


mine is yours

by cartographies



Series: personally canonical post-s4 post-quentin's-resurrection universe [1]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Aromantic Margo Hanson, Everyone Is Alive, F/F, F/M, Fix-It, M/M, Multi, Post-Season/Series 04, Relationship Negotiation, mostly off-screen but:
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2020-08-20 23:18:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 34,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20236018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartographies/pseuds/cartographies
Summary: Margo Hanson gets everything she wants.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is...so much longer than I could ever expected it to be, and literally nothing happens in it! If you want 20k+ of people doing nothing but talking about their feelings, often while cuddling, and okay also some sex, well--this might be the fic for you. In my defense, if there was ever a canon where characters needed to talk about their feelings more than post-season 4 of The Magicians, I can't think of it right now.
> 
> _What's with the crazy chapter count?_ This fic is extremely vigentte-y, and to free myself of maintaining the illusion that it has any sort of "plot" I have decided to post it in pretty bite-sized sections.
> 
> This fic touches on the tough shit inherent in any post-season 4 story: Quentin's depression and suicidal ideation, grief and mourning, the aftermath of possession--but all pretty generally.
> 
> Thank you to Gillian/knifetop, who enthusiastically and generously has read over this despite it not being exactly her bag, and who when I said "give me a title" gave me the title. She's the greatest.

Margo gets Eliot back. She hadn’t allowed herself to think beyond that, to think about possible costs or other losses, because she knew that if she thought of anything but the mantra _I’m going to get you back I’m going to get you back I’m going to get you back_ she wouldn’t be able to keep going.

When she gets a bunny from Fen, alerting Margo to the fact that shit is going down, and politely suggesting maybe she and Eliot (so happy to hear he’s okay! Yay!) could come and help, she returns to Fillory (the landmass, not the nation) alone. They meet clandestinely at an inn on the high road to Loria. 

“So,” Margo says once they are safely in a private room, “let’s think about how to get me my kingdom back.”

“Your kingdom,” Fen says slowly. “Josh, could you maybe give us a moment?” 

Josh seems slightly put out at this, but Fen smiles sweetly at him and makes a totally obvious head gesture in Margo’s direction like Margo must be _handled_ somehow, and _here Josh, let me take one for the team this time_. Margo is about to rip Fen a new asshole the second the door shuts behind Josh but Fen—_rolls her eyes?—_or as close to an eyeroll as Fen can manage, in the direction of Josh’s retreating back. 

“What’s Hoberman done to you?” is what Margo gets to lead with instead.

“Nothing!” Margo can see Fen’s patented bright cheer slough off her as soon as she and Margo are alone. “Josh is great! I just wanted to talk to you. Alone. I mean, I wanted a chance for us to talk.” 

“Well, you’ve got me, sweetness. The grown-ups can get to it.” This is unfair, but Margo is very tired, and very, very sad. 

Fen looks at Margo for a long moment. Margo looks back. Then Fen asks softly, “Where’s Eliot?”

“He’s...well, the de-possession was successful, but considering it involved me taking an ax to Eliot’s stomach, he’s not exactly in fighting shape right now. He’ll be okay, but it’s going to be a long recovery.” 

Margo tastes bile in the back of her throat. Eliot’s blood, seeping hot between her useless fingers. Eliot’s face, when he woke up from surgery and—

“Margo?” Margo guesses from the worry in Fen’s tone that it isn’t the first time she’s said Margo’s name.

“Yeah, so, it’s just you and me on this one for now.” Margo tries to put steel in her voice. She got her best friend back. She’s going to get her kingdom back. 

“Are you okay, Margo? Josh told me that Quentin…”

Margo got her best friend back, but not really, because along the way he lost something he couldn’t afford to lose. 

“Is dead,” Margo snaps. She instantly regrets it, sighs, and says, “And right now, frankly, I could use a distraction.” 

Fen cocks her head, in that bird-like way that both suggests and hides how bright Margo has begun to suspect she really is. “Is that all Fillory is to you? A distraction?” 

“What are you trying to say, Fen?” Margo doesn’t have time to play games, or the energy to spill her guts to Fen. _All it is_, Jesus. She’d left Eliot behind on Earth, shattered, because the pull of her kingdom worked on her with an almost equal force. Almost. Not quite. But Eliot was alive.

“Well,” Fen is visibly nervous, but she sits up straighter and looks Margo in the eye. “You said your kingdom, but it’s not. You gave it to _me_.”

Margo’s jaw actually drops. Is this a post-coup coup? An ambush? Is she going to have to overthrow Fen? “That’s not exactly how I remember it going down. I remember you were pretty happy to go along with a coup to depose me—” 

“I didn’t want to! I didn’t see what other choice I had, she was going to kill you—” 

But then when Margo tries to cut in, Fen actually leans across the table and slaps a hand across Margo’s mouth, and wow, bitch is going to be lucky not to lose a finger tonight. Fen is no dummy and yanks her hand back out of reach immediately, but says, in a rush, “Wait, wait! I don’t want to fight, I don’t want to take your throne—I just don’t want to lose mine.”

Margo looks at Fen, managing to look somehow steely and pleading at once. “Go on,” she grits out.

“I—I haven’t been Eliot’s wife for a while. I never was, not really. But you still trusted me with your throne when you had to go do...other stuff. Maybe just because there was no one else you could trust, but still.”

“Maybe we were wrong about that,” Margo mutters darkly.

“You weren’t! You trusted me when you had to give up your throne to save Eliot. I _know_ you did. And that means something to me. Fillory means something to me, too, it’s my _home_, and I—I’m good at it. Ruling. Or not bad at it.”

“Are you, Fen? Because you’ve been in charge three weeks and we’ve got some guy calling himself the Dark Prince amassing an army at our borders.”

“If we want to talk about failures of statesmanship, let’s talk about the person in this room who actually got deposed, not just almost deposed, because it isn’t me.”

They stare at each other, and then Margo laughs. She knows it comes out sounding totally deranged, but she’s just so fucking done.

“OK, buttercup. What are you suggesting?” 

Fen looks shocked, like she didn’t think it would be this easy, but, well: “You have all the leverage, Fen. If I want my throne back at all, I’m going to need you.”

Fen brightens again, at this. “Oh! Oh, good. Because...I don’t want to rule alone. The people don’t want that—the Dark Prince has been able to incite unrest by stirring discontent about the fact you were democratically elected and then deposed. Also he’s spread rumors that you were murdered. So they aren’t too fond of me.”

Well, it’s nice to know Margo has a little leverage here. “So what you’re saying is we’re fucked without each other.”

“Exactly!” Fen says, sounding entirely too excited about it. Then she pauses, and says, cringingly earnest, “And I don’t think you want to, either? Rule alone, I mean. You said that’s what Lord Fresh said, that you would have to learn to rule alone. But when Eliot was—gone. I was there the whole time. So was Josh. And now you’ve got Eliot back! Although it sounds like it might be a while before he can take up his duties again. But maybe me and you could...I think we could work well together.”

It’s...sweet, what Fen’s saying. It’s true that Fen and Josh and the rest had been there the whole time, but she’s wrong if she thinks that means Margo wasn’t alone. Without Eliot, Margo was alone, always, no matter who else was there. Eliot’s alive, but he’s not here with her. It’s an ache, constant, beneath her breastbone. She wanted Eliot back and she wanted him beside her as they took their kingdom back, so things could go back to normal. But for now, that’s not possible. Fen is looking at her, expectant and hopeful. 

“Yeah,” Margo says. “Alright. Well, go get Josh and let’s work out a plan.”

*

Eliot had actually nearly begged Margo to take him back to Fillory with her. He’d had to beg because he needs her to lean on if he’s to walk, but that hadn’t been her only objection. 

He’s sitting on his bed in the penthouse in his fucking _widow’s blacks_, and Margo tries to get away with telling him he’d be useless and only slow them down, but the look on his face stops her. She sits down in a chair across from him. Takes his hands. 

“Honey, I know what you’re trying to do.”

“Get our kingdom back?” 

Margo sighs. “No. What I tried to do when I thought you were dead. I ran to Fillory. I couldn’t have kept hoping that you were in there somewhere and lived, but I also couldn’t stand to be around that—that thing. So I was a coward, and I bailed, and I left Quentin to deal with it.” 

That gets a tiny reaction out of Eliot, one of the few in the week since that bonfire memorial. Aside from the fact that his entire body is a reaction, an unending reaction to that moment in the hospital where she’d had to tell him that Quentin was dead. She’d known he’d be devastated. They were all fucking devastated. But there was something about the way his face cracked open, the way it was obvious that his entire world had fucking ended, that was familiar, and told her what Eliot had not yet told her himself. 

His whole body radiates a pain that makes him almost hard to look at. Almost. The joy of looking at Eliot’s eyes in Eliot’s face in Eliot’s body wins out. 

He had told Margo, finally. It’s a lot to process right now or maybe ever, the news that your best friend lived an entire alternate life that he can remember, and also that your sweet awkward sad friend was the love of that life and maybe this life, but now he’s dead—so she mostly doesn’t. 

It’s too much to make sense of, but Margo does understand this. She leans forward, gently takes Eliot by his chin to force him to look at her. 

“I thought that was the only way I could live. Running from it. But if you had actually died, and I hadn’t done everything I could, if I’d left it all to other people, it really would have destroyed me. So you’ve gotta stay and help Julia and Alice figure out a way to fix this, OK?” He seems like he’s going to argue, but Margo kisses him hard and quick on the mouth, trying to pour some conviction into him through it.

“It would have destroyed me,” she repeats, as earnest as she’s ever been, and he looks at her for a long moment, and nods.

Margo gets it. She’s wary of Julia and Alice’s ‘let’s figure out a way to resurrect Quentin’ plans, too, out of terror of disappointment. It’s why she couldn’t help Eliot until she had something concrete to _do_, some action to take. Looking at old books that Alice and Julia have found doesn’t really qualify, and hope has never been her strong suit, or Eliot’s. 

Margo tells Eliot she’s enchanted the stupid looking mirror in his room to be a two-way with the one in her compact and they will be checking in often, and if he doesn’t or she doesn’t like what she sees she’ll come right back to set him straight, kisses him on the forehead, and leaves. He doesn’t look convinced, and he’s definitely pissed at her, but he also doesn’t have the energy to fight her on it. She goes to find Julia, whose haunted look is also way too fucking familiar, thanks.

“I’m heading back to Fillory, or else it seems like there might not be a Fillory to return to. But if there’s any real way I can help with the resurrection plans, I will, just send a rabbit and I’ll do anything I can—and if Eliot starts starts to really spiral, let me know, alright? I’ll come back.”

Julia looks at her, and they share a moment of more raw honesty and connection than they ever have or frankly probably ever will again. “I won’t let anything happen to Eliot. Quentin—Quentin really loved him, so, you know, best friend code.” Her voice trembles. “It means I care about him too.”

Margo could point out that this was less comforting than Julia might think, given the givens, but stones and glass houses. They’re trying to fix shit. It’s all they do, fuck up and try to fix shit, and maybe when everything is less apocalytpically terrible then they can try to fuck up less in the first place. She draws back her shoulders, takes a deep breath, and texts 23 that’s she’s ready for her ride. 

*

Fen and Margo deal with the Dark Prince, get Margo unbanished, and take their places as the first joint High Kings of Fillory.

They’ve been in repossession of Whitespire for a couple weeks, and the plans for an official joint coronation ceremony to take place in a few months time are well underway when Margo goes to Fen’s chambers already dressed in Earth clothes.

“Oh,” Fen says when she sees her. Her tone is carefully neutral, “Are you leaving already?”

“Maybe,” Margo says, sitting on the edge of Fen’s bed. Fen has turned around in her desk chair to face her. “If it’s OK with you. We’re a team.”

Margo guesses they are. Running around in Fillorian mud for several months committing acts of guerilla warfare against some aspiring Voldemort knockoff really bonds people. That shared dedication to a mutual end works wonders. 

Fen flushes with pleasure at these magical words, which was the goal, but she’s getting less easy to manage. Her tone is still a little sharp when she says, “Yes, which is why I don’t understand why you’re leaving, when there’s so much left to do here.” 

“I want to stay,” Margo says, “believe me.”

It’s true. As much as she misses Eliot, ordering around her reconstituted minions at Whitespire sounds much more appealing than throwing herself back into the morass of grief and fervor that she senses from her communication with Eliot and Julia.

“Fen, honey, let’s talk,” she pats the place beside her on the bed.

When she’s settled at Margo’s side, she asks, “Is it Eliot?”

Margo nods. “When I told you that I left Eliot on Earth because of his injury, I wasn’t telling you the whole truth.”

Margo isn’t really eager to get into it, but she needs to give Fen a solid reason. “Quentin died, but they—Eliot and Julia and Alice—are trying to resurrect him. That’s what they’ve been doing.”

Fen says, “Oh,” and is obviously trying to restrain herself from commenting on how maybe they’ve all lost their grip on sanity. “And they need your help?”

“I know it sounds kind of crazy, even considering everything else we’ve gone through. But our crew has defied death before. Alice blew up, and was miraculously restored to fuck us over another day.” Then Margo sighs. “But no, they probably don’t need my help, particularly. It’s Eliot—Quentin’s death really fucked him up.”

“Quentin was your friend,” Fen says, but there’s a dawning light in her eyes. “You’re upset, too.”

Margo feels her chin start to wobble, that tell that she hates. “Yeah. But this isn’t the first time—I don’t know how much you picked up about Eliot’s emotional state when you two got married, but he was a fucking mess. He’d lost his boyfriend,”—god, the amount of shit they just don’t have time to unpack is _insane—_“and he nearly drank himself to death, and then he found out he was High King of Fillory. And I—I really fucked up, that time. I was there, but I didn’t know shit about how to help him when he was that kind of pain. I still don’t. But I hated leaving him. I just—I needed to get my kingdom, _our kingdom,_ back. But now...”

There’s a bit to process in this speech, so she gives Fen a moment. She has learned over the last few months that if you give Fen time to really consider what you’ve said, you’re often rewarded. 

“You didn’t want to leave him, when I sent for you,” Fen says after a moment. 

“No, I really fucking didn’t.” 

Margo had felt it as an almost physical thing, the need to be close to him, to not let him out of her sight. And she remembered Mike. She didn’t know if the hope of getting Quentin back, which Margo herself couldn’t quite buy into, was enough to tether him. What if she returned, only to find he’d hidden a breakdown from her well enough that she’d be taken by surprise by the drunken, strung-out Eliot that she remembered before they landed in Fillory? He’d been almost numb when she’d left, in shock, but that could fade. Before, Fillory had been enough to pull him out of the pit. If Julia and Alice could get somewhere, surely Quentin would provide a similar counterforce. Then maybe that hope could last long enough for Margo to sort out things in Fillory, so she could be there for the crash when it turned out Quentin was gone for good. This is how her thoughts had run, agonized, all the while she packed and sent Fen a return bunny telling her she was on the way. 

“But you came,” Fen says, softly.

“I did.” It meant something to her, that moment she’d been crowned in Whitespire. It meant almost more than anything. She’d given it up for Eliot, and she would do it again. She’d make the same choice, every time. But pulling herself away from Eliot, after she’d just gotten him back—it had felt like almost an equal sacrifice. “I’ll always come back, Fen.”

Fen sighs. “I believe you. I just—the last time you left you got _brainwashed_.”

“How do you know what brainwashing is, Fen?”

“When Todd took Fray and I to the City, there was this man, and he wanted me to take some test that would help me _unleash my true potential_, and Todd said he was a “Scientologist” and that they…”

“Say no more,” Margo says. The thought of Fen the Scientologist is kind of terrifying. “Don’t worry. I’ll do my best not to have a repeat.” 

Margo goes to her desk, gets her compact, hands it to Fen. “Here. Two-way mirror, direct to the penthouse. In case the fucking bunnies fall silent. And hey, take this opportunity to overthrow me again if you want, I bet you could swing it this time now that we’ve gotten rid of say, half of our enemies.”

Fen looks so earnestly horrified that before she can protest Margo leans over and gives her a smacking kiss on the cheek. It’s half mocking, half sincere. “Kidding, Fen, don’t have a stroke. See you soon, we’ve got a party to plan.” 

Margo takes in the high color in Fen’s cheeks with satisfaction, and then she’s gone. 


	2. Chapter 2

It’s very early in the morning on the day after they resurrect Quentin that Margo gets a text from Eliot that says, _come here, _and she quietly gets out of the bed she’s sharing with Josh and makes her way down the hall of the penthouse to Eliot’s room. She hadn’t been sleeping, too keyed up on leftover adrenaline. She gets to Eliot’s room and he’s sitting up in bed, unsurprisingly also sleepless.

“Sleep a no-go?” She says, and crawls into bed with him, makes him lay down so she can spoon up behind him.

“Yeah. I keep wanting to go to Quentin’s room and—check. Make sure it’s real. But he finally dropped off to sleep and he needs it, he looked fucking terrible. I don’t want to wake him.”

Margo kisses the back of his neck, where a post-Monster haircut has revealed the tender skin.

“You could have stayed with him,” Margo says. She isn’t sure what the status is on Alice and Quentin’s relationship, but surely something like resurrection throws a lot of normal considerations out the window. Alice herself had gone to her own room to pass out, looking ghastly after sleeping only two hours a night for weeks.

“Staring at him like a creep. I need to start somewhere with letting him out of my sight, _sleeping at night_ has to be the bare minimum.” Margo thinks about how many nights she’d insisted on sleeping in Eliot’s bed, post-Monster. Eliot is doing some weird punishment thing of his, but they don’t have to get into it. 

“It’s weird. Quentin’s body is brand new, you wouldn’t think he’d be that exhausted.”

“Newborns sleep _all the time_, Margo, just in like, three hour intervals.”

Right. Newborns are a thing Eliot knows about. Because he had had one. Jesus. “Babies are a pretty abstract concept for me.”

She hears Eliot’s amused huff of breath, and then he rolls over to face her. “It does actually make me think of when Teddy was born. If I woke up in the middle of the night I couldn’t resist going to his crib to make sure he was still breathing. One time I got up and Quentin was already there doing the same thing, and we had to try not to laugh too loudly, and then Arielle must have heard something and woken up and _she_ came to check—”

Margo is surprised to hear him talking about this. After his big confession to her, they hadn’t talked about it at all. Too painful. But now Quentin is alive, and Margo feels the joy of it in her whole body, and she knows Eliot does too, and also he sounds fucking high from lack of sleep.

Suddenly, Eliot’s whole body goes still, straining to hear something. Margo listens but doesn’t hear anything for a long moment, and then comes a tentative knock at the door followed by a whisper Margo can’t make out, but Eliot says “Quentin,” like the force of his hyperfocus on Quentin has tuned him into some higher frequency.

“I’m awake, Q,” Eliot calls out, struggling back into a sitting position. Then Quentin opens the door and Eliot fumbles for the bedside light and when it illuminates Quentin standing in the doorway Margo’s stomach drops, and she hears Eliot’s sharp frightened intake of breath. 

Quentin looks terrible, far worse than when he’d gone to his bedroom hours ago. He’s trembling from head to toe, and Margo can’t help but think, and knows Eliot will be thinking, of the moment when it had seemed like it wasn’t going to take, like the new body they’d created was rejecting Quentin’s soul and consciousness—the mechanics were really Alice and Julia’s department—and his body had thrashed horribly and the sweet brown eyes, Quentin’s eyes, that had seen and known them had rolled back into his skull, and the mouth that had said Eliot’s name was flecked with blood-tinged froth, and Eliot had crashed to his knees and crawled over to Quentin in a way that made Margo wince, and cradled Quentin’s head in his hands and said _Q, Q, baby, can you hear me,_ and it had been _awful—_but then it had been _fine_, they’d gotten him stabilized and to the Brakebills infirmary and he’d been released with a clean bill of health and they’d all come back to the penthouse, but now his face is grey and it sounds like he’s panting for breath. 

Quentin sees the look on their faces and tries to smile, gasps out, “I’m fine, I’m fine,” and then he takes two big steps across the room and launches himself at them, tumbling Eliot back into the sheets.

Eliot, horrified, says, “Q, what—” 

—at the same time Quentin gasps out, “ItjustfeelslikemyskinisdisintegratingbutI’mfine,” in one long reedy breath. 

Quentin has tucked himself under Eliot’s chin, slid his arms around Eliot’s torso and he says, “Please, _please_ can you just touch me, it was _so cold_.”

Eliot nods frantically and says, meeting Margo’s eyes over Quentin’s head in a look of complete terror that she’s sure isn’t eased any by the fear she knows is on her own face, “Yeah, sweetheart, we can do that,” and hugs him tighter, puts his hand on the back of Quentin’s neck, drops a kiss on his forehead. 

Margo is almost afraid to touch Quentin, but she slides one hand under his shirt, rubs his back. She wraps the other around his middle, laces their fingers together. 

They lay like that for a long, long time, until Quentin’s breathing evens out and he stops shaking and he starts to fidget, says, “Guys, I’m, um, I’m okay now, can I—” and they move apart just a little, so Quentin is lying between them. His face is back to its normal warm tone, scoured by tear tracks. He wipes at his face with a hand that still shakes a little.

Eliot is not appeased by this. “Q, I’m going to go get Alice—” but Quentin reaches out and grabs Eliot’s wrist, shaking his head frantically. 

Margo interrupts, her thoughts catching on something, “What was cold, Q?”

“No, no, really, I’m fine—” Quentin doesn’t seem to hear her, and then he really _looks_ at Eliot for the first time and tears well up in his eyes again. “Oh god, _Eliot_, you’re OK, you’re really OK, oh my god—”

“_I’m_ OK, Jesus Christ, Q, you _died—_” and then Eliot’s crying too. 

Dread, low in her stomach. She touches Quentin on the shoulder, ignores Eliot’s glare. “Q, what was cold?”

Quentin doesn’t look away from Eliot, but he does finally answer her: “Dead, being dead, it was _cold_,” and, ice-veined herself, Margo gets up and goes and wakes Alice. 


	3. Chapter 3

“So, spill,” Margo says after their drink order has been taken. 

It’s a lovely day, and Margo and Eliot have just accompanied Quentin to his first therapy appointment. It was only going to be Eliot, but Margo had tagged along last minute because it seemed like it would be a rare chance to get Eliot without Quentin—which is hard to do these days. She gets it—that ‘miraculously back from the dead’ high is hard to break, not that she would know from personal experience. She never got it once Eliot was unpossessed because someone _else_ dying turns out to be a pretty big downer. 

When they’d seen Quentin to his new therapist’s door, Margo suggested going somewhere to wait out the hour. Eliot had seemed like he wanted to wait in the fucking waiting room, but Margo sensed that this was only going to make Quentin feel more anxious so she’d said, “You’ll text us when you’re done, right sweetie?” and swept Eliot out of the building. Also the waiting room of a therapist’s office was not the atmosphere for a fun chat. The chat probably wouldn’t be fun anyway, so might as well help things along as much as possible. This café will do. 

Quentin has been alive again for a month. Margo had had to go back to Fillory, to deal with shit, but has come back in for an update and also to like, buy tampons. They’ve reconnected the clock portal and relocated it to the penthouse, and between that and 23 Earth-Fillory travel is pretty easy these days. 

Eliot sighs. Quentin isn’t doing great, which is to be expected. But Eliot and Julia had become a real team not just on the level of getting Quentin back physically, but also about addressing the entire slow trauma-induced mental break that led to his death in the first place. So, therapy, and going back on his meds, and a routine, and the three of them mostly taking a time out from whatever shit Alice and Kady have thrown themselves into. There’s a lot of stuff going on, with the sudden insane influx of magic and the continuing threat of the Library, but it mostly seems to not be world-ending. Margo knows all this, got the recap when she first popped in, but it’s not what she’s asking exactly.

Eliot scrubs at his face. “It’s. Wonderful. Like I just can’t believe it, and it’s physically agonizing to stop looking at him or be away from him. And it’s awful at the same time. Because he’s in a lot of pain.” 

“Yeah,” Margo says, “I know the feeling.”

They pause for the waitress to set down their drinks, and then Margo reaches across to lace their fingers together and says, “What about you, honey? You don’t seem like you’re doing so great, either.” 

Eliot’s face is still drawn, big dark circles under his eyes. His hands shake. It's not like Margo expected Quentin Coldwater being restored to them to wipe the slate of the last fucking year and a half clean—but then again maybe she had, a little. Surely bringing someone back from the dead should provide at least a little relief, but everyone is still mostly just exhausted.

“I’m fine, Margo. Quentin—he’s alive. That’s what matters.” When Margo appears unappeased, he switches defensive tracks, says, “I mean, are _you_ fine?”

“Sure,” Margo says brightly. “You’re alive. Quentin’s alive. I’ve got my throne back. That’s what matters.” 

Eliot looks at her for a long moment, then away when he says, “Fine, OK, yeah, it’s—” he laughs weakly, “it seems like in a fair and just universe Quentin being not-dead should overwrite away the six months he was dead, but it turns out it doesn’t. He was still dead. He is always going to have been dead. I think I. I think I’m always going to feel it.”

Margo’s heart _hurts_, she still can’t start crying because she thinks she still would never stop. She squeezes his hand, too tight. 

“Probably. Life’s a bitch that way.” Eliot doesn’t smile, not quite.

“I mean, I’m a master at repressing things, and working to get him back—well, _working_, I tried to read some books Julia and Alice shoved at me and made coffee—I could actually think around the fact that it was something wearing my skin that—that made him _want to die_, that that thing got loose in the world because I—”

“Hey, no,” Margo cuts in. “That’s not on you, alright? I was the one that suggested it. I was the one that got you the gun. It could have just as easily have been me.” 

Eliot’s jaw sets, and she knows he doesn’t believe her, but she’ll keep saying it. She’ll say this, too: “Out of everyone, you’re the least guilty. Between the two of us I’m the one who should...” She trails off. Eliot isn’t the one she owes an apology too, not exactly.

Eliot looks at her, and doesn’t try to absolve her. He doesn’t look angry at her either. He just looks miserable, which is worse. “That’s my point. You can say that now he’s alive. We can all...make amends. When he was dead, it was too self-indulgent to wallow in my fucking self-loathing, even for me, or think a lot about _why_ he was dead, but now he’s alive and it’s now it’s all I can think about, all the fucking mistakes I made and what they did to him.” 

Margo gets this, too. She wakes up at night sometimes, and thinks of something like Julia telling her they’d almost trapped the Monster and thus Eliot’s body in Blackspire for all eternity before Eliot broke out and let Quentin know he was alive and Margo has to go throw up, and throw up and throw up until there is nothing but bile. 

“Maybe you should talk to someone too, El.” She could launch into the unending string of horrors he’s faced and she knows it would do shit-all, but there’s something that might work. “I know you want to be there for Quentin right now, but maybe this would help you do that.”

She knows you have to, like, _want_ to go to therapy for it to work, but she has no idea how to get Eliot to that point. Maybe if she can just get him to go something else would take over. It’s probably the best she can do. 

“That’s a low fucking blow, you bitch, and you know it,” Eliot says, but weirdly that’s what gets a smile out of him. Good enough for now, they can come back to it.

“Since you aren’t coming back to Fillory, you might as well take advantage of what Earth has to offer.” She had been serious about dropping it, but she needed a segue into the next uncomfortable topic of conversation. They haven’t talked about it, and Eliot hasn’t said anything to her. It makes it so much more painful, that lack of articulation. The fact that they don’t need to talk about it, that Margo just _knows_ the way Eliot’s center of gravity has shifted. 

“Therapy has never been high on that list before,” he says, but gives up the attempt to deflect even before Margo can call bullshit. “Listen, Bambi…”

But then she can’t stand even the tiny bit of inner conflict she can see in his eyes. Margo holds up her hand to stop him. “No, Eliot, it’s OK. This is where you need to be. I understand. I wish I could be here too.” 

This is both a truth and a lie. Margo has wondered, from the second she decided to leave Eliot behind on Earth when she answered Fen’s call, whether it was actually cowardice. She was unequal to Eliot’s grief. She’s unequal to what has been going on in that penthouse. She’d known it from the second she’d stepped through the clock this time, into its hushed atmosphere, into a space that somehow vibrated with a gentle allowance for suffering. Both Quentin and Eliot both smiled to see her—smiles of relief at this unexpected visitor from a distant planet, alien in more ways than one. That’s okay. They’d both looked relieved again, when she’d tagged along with them today. She’d made them both smile with her bitchy running commentary as they made their way through the city. Now, the sun gilds the side of Eliot’s face, casts his long shadow onto the sidewalk. 

“Anyway,” Margo says, “you’ve been deposed. You have no duties you’re neglecting, and me and Fen are doing fine. It’s OK.” 

Eliot nods at her words, looking less than convinced, obviously having expected more of a fight on this subject. Margo looks at the time—only a few minutes left before they have to go pick up Quentin. There’s something else she’s been wondering. 

“Back to the subject of amends. Have you made your big confession to Quentin yet?” 

Eliot gives an aggravated huff of breath, instantly on the defensive for some reason. “Jesus, Margo, he’s just been alive for a month. After _killing himself_. He’s not in any place to fucking—date. Or decide he doesn’t want to—do that with me anymore, I don’t just assume he’s not gotten over—me, that he’s just waiting for—” 

“So I gather that’s a no then,” Margo says, and in response to Eliot’s eye roll, goes on, “I didn’t say anything about dating! But you told me turning him down was the biggest regret of your _life_ and that it was destroying you that you’d never get the chance to make things right, but now you have that chance. It’s a reasonable question.”

Because Margo is concerned for Quentin, but she’s concerned for Eliot too. She knows the way Eliot’s voice had sounded when he’d said _I love him and he’ll never—_, the way he’d buried his head in her lap, gasping, is something she’s going to remember till the day she dies.

“Yeah, alright,” Eliot says.

Margo stirs the ice at the bottom of her drink with her straw, and gazes at Eliot with an exaggerated look of contemplation.

“I don’t understand, maybe you can help me. If Quentin does still love you, and you tell him you love him, this seems like a positive to me. It doesn’t mean you have to do anything about it—although you’re living together and spending all your time together, so that seems like mostly semantics. Plus, you know, fucking, when you’re both up to that.”

Eliot doesn’t dignify this with a response.

“And if he doesn’t love you,” she goes on, an almost but not quite imperceptible flinch from Eliot giving him away, “what happens?”

Eliot doesn’t answer this either, so Margo presses. “Would you stop being his friend? Leave?”

“_God_. Of course not.”

“Then it seems to me this doesn’t have much to do with Quentin. It seems like it has more to do with you.”

“It’s not that simple. He’s—you’ve seen him, you’ve seen us. It just feels like a lot to burden him with, right now.”

“El, sweetie,” _you idiot_, is what it comes out sounding like. “There’s no way your love is a burden. You know that, right? That’s the bullshit that got you into this in the first place.”

Eliot looks mulish, but his voice goes vulnerable, raw. “I just. I don’t. He _died_. He’s alive. I don’t need anything else—”

“Exactly. Quentin is _alive_. Part of being alive is getting to make up your mind for yourself. Maybe you don’t need anything else, but he sure does. I’m not saying propose marriage. I’m not even saying lay it all on him right away. I trust you on how he’s doing, I know it’s rough right now. Just don’t pull a I’ll-Stay-in-Fillory-forever-and-forsake-all-chance-at-happiness, again, okay?” 

“That is—this is nothing like that, I knew you would be pissed about this—” 

“I’m not pissed,” Margo hisses. Her nails turn into the skin of Eliot’s palm where they’re holding hands on the table. “I’m _sad, _asshole. You asked if I’m fine, fuck, of course I’m not. When you were possessed—every day I thought I’d do anything to get you back. Anything. I’d trade anything. I did little thought experiments. Would I give up Fillory—yes. Could I live with never seeing you again, as long as you were alive somewhere—yes. And I meant it, I meant all of it, and it’s_ total bullshit, _you’re my best friend, and I got you back, but you aren’t with me, and of course that hurts, you dick—” 

Tears, burning at the edges of her eyes. 

“Bambi,” Eliot says. Tender and furious. 

Margo takes a deep breath, pushes it down. “I know this is where you need to be, and what you need to be doing. I know this all sounds weird coming from me, but you don’t have to try to get used to it. I’m not going to be this understanding forever. I want you back in Fillory with me someday. I know it’ll never be the same, but still—I’m sure I’ll be a bitch about it eventually, and I won’t feel bad about it because I love you, and I staked my claim on you a long time ago. That’s all I’m saying. It’s not selfish. There’s nothing about letting Quentin know you love him that will break him.” 

Eliot smiles at her, fond in that way where he doesn’t quite believe her but will humor her for the moment. “OK, I’ll take it under advisement. I promise I’m not just torturing myself. I’m just being careful. It’s too important not to.”

Margo strokes her thumb over his knuckles, in misplaced apology for the half-moons her nails dug into his palm. Nods. “I know. Speaking of. Let’s go get him, okay?”


	4. Chapter 4

Although Margo can stand being apart for Eliot better now, prolonged absence tends to make her irritable and mopey. She can admit that to herself. Eliot and Quentin are on Earth, and Fillory has been hectic. Now that the open rebellion and civil war have fizzled out, she and Fen are getting down to brass tacks, ruling-wise. From her conversations with Eliot, she gathers that he and Quentin have been placed in charge of running the Baba Yaga’s insane magical errands so everyone doesn’t end up homeless. 

So after a two week absence with no end in sight, she’s getting drunk with Fen in her chambers at Whitespire. Things have been busy, but this late in the evening on the Fillorian equivalent of a Thursday, there’s nothing going on. 

“I get it,” Fen slurs a bit and cuddles back into Margo, where Margo is sitting behind her fucking _brushing her hair_, like it’s a middle school sleepover—Margo assumes, entirely based on TV, she didn’t actually have friends in middle school. “Eliot’s your family. Of course you miss him.” 

“Eliot isn’t my family.” Margo says this almost before Fen can finish, struck by a sense of wrongness. Fen turns around, eyes huge, brows creased in confusion. She tries to think of how to explain this to Fen.

“I _have_ a family. They fucking suck. Families suck. You don’t get to choose them but hopefully you grow up and get to a place where you can choose not to speak to them anymore. Eliot—Eliot is so much better than _family_.” 

She had planned on saying something corny about how Eliot and she _chose_ each other, but now that formulation doesn’t seem quite right. She actually thinks she had far less choice in the matter of loving Eliot than she did in the one of not loving her family anymore, but it was the only choice she’d ever been fine with losing. 

Fen looks even more confused, and maybe kind of hurt. Of course Fen, who wants a family so badly, wouldn’t understand. Or had wanted. They work together, they spend most of their time together, ruling a country, but Margo still couldn’t guess what Fen wants out of life. Maybe Margo should have explained this to Fen earlier, when she and Eliot were married. Not that it would have changed anything, but Fen would have had a better idea, maybe, of how exactly doomed the whole thing was, but then again—something she’s been thinking around teases at her tipsy brain—maybe it wouldn’t explain as much about Eliot as she would have once assumed. It seems like a family is maybe something Eliot wants. 

Fen looks down like the bedspread suddenly fascinates her. “I thought—I thought, sometimes, when you first came to Fillory, that you and Eliot were the real married ones.”

Margo snorts at this, hears a responding sound of self-deprecation from Fen, whose eyes dart back up and whose tension eases at Margo’s smile. “I know that’s not right! Eliot’s not—but that’s how it felt, like I was intruding on something.” 

Margo feels a pang of—not guilt, exactly. Fen is right and wrong at the same time. She’d been an outsider, but _intruder_ implies a real threat, and Fen had never been that. She had been too much of a nonentity, to Margo, then. Not to Eliot, because—that’s just Eliot. 

Margo can’t apologize for her total disregard of Fen and her feelings, back at the start of all this. She remembers too keenly shivering in the Fillorian mud that had trapped Eliot so neatly and looking up into Eliot’s face as the realization of what the rest of his life was going to look like, what he was going to have to give up, rippled over it. Of the way he didn’t even fight it. Margo had had to be the one to do it for him. She’d offered him an out, even if it meant they all got murdered by the Beast, and she’d meant it. She’d meant it. It’s not Fen’s fault, but still—she won’t apologize. 

“Well, it’s closer than Eliot being my _brother_ or something.” That’s twisted in a way even she and Eliot wouldn’t enjoy, but whatever. “But—no. I’m not the marrying type, Fen.”

_Eliot’s not_ and—Margo isn’t.

“I know,” Fen says. Margo isn’t so sure she does, but. “I didn’t think that for long. But I guess I don’t know exactly what you and Eliot are then.” 

“He’s my best friend.” It’s not Margo’s problem if that isn’t sufficient for other people. It’s good enough for her. “But this is all just semantics. You’re right, I do—I do miss him.”

Margo nudges Fen back around. Buries her hands in the warm animal mass of her hair and resumes brushing. 

*

Eliot had wanted Quentin from the moment he’d laid eyes on him. Margo didn’t get the appeal—except she did, because she understood Eliot, and so it was clear that Quentin may as well have been crafted in a lab somewhere to destroy him. If this hadn’t been obvious, Eliot had told her as much. Their seduction plans for the two hot nerds—Quentin for Eliot, Alice for Margo—had been a favorite topic of conversation, those first few months of their second year. 

_Eliot is tipsy and sprawled across her bed and saying, “No one has ever shown him a good time, you can just see it.”_

__

__

_“In his life,” Margo says tartly. “He’s never had a good time in his life, ever. You might want to work up to it, take for ice-cream, play Jenga, you don’t want to break him.”_

_Eliot continues as if she hasn't spoken, as if she isn't there. But in a good way, as if he is speaking to himself, as if Margo bitching is an integral part of the architecture of his mind. _

_“He has no idea. I could blow his mind. I would make him _cry_.”_

_“He does that all the time already.” _

_He rolls towards her then so they’re facing each other, looks at her with a hot, slow smile, and she’d rolls her eyes but feels a sympathetic lurch low in her belly, “Yeah, and I’ll give him a good reason for once.”_

_“Well, that shouldn’t be hard.”_

_It’s his turn to roll his eyes at her, but his smile has turned sweet. “It doesn’t have to be hard. It’s not always about a challenge. You like a challenge, Bambi. That’s the appeal with Alice Quinn, right? Nothing easy for you.”_

_Margo smirks. “Something like that. Our goals are the same. They both really gotta relax. I think Alice would be a lot more bearable if someone made her scream once in a while.”_

_Eliot laughs. _

_“If Coldwater’s such an easy lay, why haven’t you yet?” Eliot’s face does something she can't quite read, then. It’s something she’s been wondering. Eliot is embarrassingly into Quentin, but despite Margo’s jokes about how hilariously on brand it is, there’s something different here. Most flavors-of-the-month are exactly that. _

_Eliot’s response is light enough. “I said he’d be easy once I got him there. Getting him there, though—straight boys require careful maneuvering.”_

_That hadn’t been Margo’s read of Eliot’s—and Eliot’s and hers—various conquests, but before she can follow the thread of the thought of what exactly Eliot wants from Quentin and how it seems less straightforward than she’d first believed, he says: “I almost did, a couple weeks ago.”_

_“Oh?”_

_“Yeah, the day we took the nerds out in the big city.” Right—Eliot had told her about some odyssey to find a book, the day she and Alice tracked down Emily Greenstreet. _

_“Lucky you. Taking Alice to find out information about her dead brother was a real boner killer. I guess you and little Q had more fun.” Then Alice had left Brakebills, but she’d returned a few days ago, just in time for the Welters game. That could be fun. Alice seemed the type to get wound up by some competition, and then Margo could calm her down. Or wind her up some more. But right now she’s more interested in Eliot’s put on look of tragedy at the memory of his failed seduction. _

_“Not really,” Eliot says, his thumb running mindlessly over the skin of her knee, no express intent behind it, no goal except the pleasure inherent in it: thumb, skin. “I told you, he ran into some hedge who _apparently_ is his childhood-best-friend-turned-unrequited-crush...”_

_“How cliché.”_

_“They had a spat. Anyway I was...comforting him. With wine, and then...”_

_“Give him another reason to cry, right. Or show him that some little high school crush is nothing to cry over.” _

_“We were interrupted.” Eliot sighs. “And I haven’t spotted my next opening.”_

_“OK, but if you got him there. What are we thinking. Virgin?”_

_Eliot’s face flushes a little, and she knows she’s hit it dead on. _

_His flush wasn’t one of embarrassment, but it should be, and she lets him know: “God, you’re so embarrassing.” _

_She’s smiling into his eyes, laughing, and he is too, totally unashamed. His blatant, consistent kink for ushering straight boys through a gay panic, with a magnanimity both put-on and genuine, dialed up to 11 in Quentin Coldwater._

_“Now, now, I’m sure some nice girl with like, pink hair and a nose ring in his D&D group took pity on him at some point.”_

_“That’s unnervingly detailed.” Margo’s scorn is more genuine here, at how instantaneous this response was. What a fucking weirdo, fantasizing about how some nerd lost his V-card. Eliot’s never boring. _

_But Eliot ignores her completely, dreamy, lost to it. “But with a guy—no. Maybe like a handjob, but he’s never been fucked and just—look at him. That’s…”_

_Margo sits up. Swings her leg over Eliot’s hips, straddles his lap. “A shame.”_

_“A crime,” Eliot says. “A cosmic injustice.” They’re both laughing again as he slides his big warm hand up her thigh, under her skirt. _

Eliot and Quentin work it out. 

Margo knows what’s happened the second Eliot’s face takes shape in the surface of her vanity mirror at Whitespire. His smile is blinding and he looks like he might throw up.They have bi-weekly scheduled chats but in practice talk to each other far more frequently. This particular call in an unscheduled one. 

“Well, well, well,” Margo says. Pauses, looks at him again. “Wait, are you _crying?_”


	5. Chapter 5

Margo has a nightmare, about six months after they get Quentin back, a year after Eliot has been unpossessed. It’s starts out as nonsense. She and Eliot are on a party on a boat—not the _Muntjac_, some swanky yacht. They’re dressed to the nines, and holding champagne flutes. Fillory has really messed with even her subconscious, because there’s a talking bear on the yacht with them, but it’s not a sign of dream logic. It’s just a talking bear. Margo’s life contains talking bears. The weird thing is that he's talking to Eliot and Margo about his tech startup.

Then the dream shifts to them being on a cruise, like the Caribbean one she took with her family the summer before ninth grade. The whole experience is recreated with weird accuracy. She’s sitting by a huge pool on deck, sipping a virgin strawberry daiquiri, but Eliot is there, so it’s fun instead of horrible. Also she gets to wear a bikini this time. But then she turns to Eliot to say something to this effect and it’s not Eliot. The Monster is standing there, she instantly knows it’s not Eliot even though he’s in a bathing suit. His guts, Eliot’s guts, are falling out of him from where Margo’s axes have torn him open. Eliot is dying in front of her, his life pulsing out of him in a huge red wave of blood across the polished shine of the deck, but it hasn’t worked, her axes haven’t worked, Eliot’s body is dying and the Monster is still there. He smiles at her horribly and there’s blood around his mouth. She feels it leave a sticky mark on her skin when the Monster leans forward and presses a kiss to her forehead, and then she wakes up, gasping. 

She’s in her room in the penthouse, in New York City. She’s out of her bed and down the hall in front of Eliot’s door before she even thinks about it, needing to see him, needing to reassure herself that he’s here, he’s safe. Her fingers, damp with sweat, slip unpleasantly against the handle. Her failure to get the door open makes her pause. It’s not just Eliot’s room; it’s Eliot and Quentin’s room. 

“Margo?” Quentin has approached behind her without her hearing, coming from the kitchen. She whirls around, only so spooked because of the aftereffects of the dream. This is a household full of insomniacs. It’s no real surprise to see Quentin coming from the kitchen at 3 AM, glass of water in hand.

Quentin takes one look at her gray face and says, “Bad dream?”

“The Monster was—I wanted to see—” It leaves something to be desired for coherence, but Quentin gives a sad smile of total understanding. 

“Yeah, I’ve—I’ve had a few of those.” He swallows, and his eyes dart towards the closed door nervously. Quentin has literally died and been resurrected, but this still has him in its grip. He motions with his glass of water, says, “Um, if you want, uh—the bed’s a king.”

She feels a little jerk of resentment, at the invitation. Who does Quentin think he is? But she’s taking his outstretched hand without thinking about it. Follows him, crawls into bed with Eliot silently, tucks herself under his chin, breathes in the familiar scent of his body. Hears him say her name, thick with sleep—

*

Margo sleeps fitfully, and around dawn she drags herself back to her room, where she passes out until nearly noon. When she finally wakes up and shambles into the kitchen, Quentin is there. It’s weird to see him without Eliot. He tells her Eliot’s at therapy without her having to ask. 

The detritus of an elaborate breakfast are spread out on the counter, courtesy of Eliot. Quentin gets a plate of French toast out of the microwave and sets it before her along with a cup of coffee. 

“Eliot’s trained you so well,” she says with a shit-eating grin. He blushes, gets a cup of coffee for himself, sits beside her. It’s nice. 

Margo and Quentin are alone, which doesn’t happen very often, and he’s actually just brought up something she wants to talk about. Margo turns towards Quentin and smiles, just a normal and totally natural smile, which seems to make him nervous. He swallows and won’t meet her eyes, only to be visibly brought up short when what Margo says is, “So how did you manage to get Eliot to go to therapy?”

She’s been wondering. When Eliot told her he had tossed it off casually, with a joke. She’d seen from the set of his shoulders, the studied insouciance that had always been so transparent to her, that her reaction mattered. Margo had only a second to decide how to respond, and had thrown out a joke in return. Seen Eliot’s shoulders relax, just a bit. She’d been pleased that she guessed right, that he hadn’t wanted her to make a big deal of it, or take it too seriously—and maybe a little hurt, too. But she thought it was probably a good idea, and hadn’t wanted to spook him. 

“Oh, well.” Quentin looks back at her. “You all insisted I go. And you were right. But it made me feel like—like I was weak. Because we’ve all been through so much fucked up shit and I was the only one who—gave up.”

Margo opens her mouth to protest, and Quentin raises his hand to stop her, and smiles. “I know that’s not true. All the therapy, right? But I said I didn’t want to feel alone, and that got to him.”

“Wow,” Margo says, respect coloring her tone. “That’s masterful, Coldwater. I’m impressed.”

Quentin rolls his eyes at her. “It wasn’t a _plan_. I was just being a brat. But it worked out for me. And for Eliot.”

“Is it? Working for Eliot?” 

Quentin shrugs. “You can’t really—mark it like that. He keeps going back, though. Things are—they’re better.”

“They are,” Margo says. They are. She thinks of last night’s terror, forces the bite of food she just took down a suddenly constricted throat.

“What about you, Margo?” Quentin asks, soft. She looks at him in his button up, finally dressing like an adult and all it took was acquiring the wardrobe of his mind-wipe alter ego. His achingly earnest eyes. His capable looking hands resting on his knees, rather than playing with his hair or fidgeting. “Do you—do you often have nightmares like that?”

“Sometimes,” she says, a little curt. “Do you?” 

“Yeah,” Quentin says, strained, and Margo could kick herself. _Does he have nightmares_, Christ. She remembers Julia telling Margo, _he touched him like—. _She remembers the one time, the Monster reaching out and touching Margo’s face, her hair, very gently with Eliot’s infinitely familiar hands. For Quentin, that perversion of tenderness, multiplied tenfold. 

“Sorry, stupid fucking question,” Margo says. This isn’t what she really wants to say sorry for.

Quentin gives her a grim smile. “It’s not. Because that's what's so fucking awful, right, that everything is—on its way to being _so good_, it is good, but still…” 

“Yeah,” she sighs, “isn’t that just a real kick in the pussy.”

Quentin snorts, and Margo says, “I’m glad it’s getting better, Q.”

“Me too. I hope it is for you too.”

It’s stupid to pretend, especially last night, that she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “It’s great. Fillory continues to be a giant pain in the ass, but…”

“You love it.” 

“Yeah, I really love spending my days solving the talking beaver housing shortage,” she snipes, but she can’t help but grin.

They’ve turned towards each other, knees touching. Golden afternoon light falls through the windows. Quentin says, “I think that’s part of my problem—if there is one. The thing about you know, quests and constant crises, was that they were the cause of…”

“Non-stop trauma,” Margo says, “Yes.” 

“Yeah, _that_, and I don’t miss it—I _really_, really don’t—but they also were the thing that kept me from thinking about shit.”

“Ignoring it until it festered—” Quentin glares at her like _you are so full of shit_ and yeah, she is, “No, Q, I get it. Now it’s just...life.” 

Quentin huffs. “Yeah, and it’s just—everything’s so normal, you know, by our standards, and I have nothing to do but think about my shit. Which is good, and also fucking horrible.” 

“There can be too much of a good thing,” Margo says carefully. “Things are pretty calm in Fillory and—” She was going to say she could use the help, but that’s a fucking lie. She just misses them. “—shit Q, you never even really got to enjoy it. Come talk to the talking beavers for me.” 

A month ago, she’d asked Eliot about if he’d ever come back to Fillory, even part-time. _“Bambi, I want to, believe me, but I just don’t think—” _She got it, she really did. No therapy in Fillory, and the equilibrium he and Quentin had set up still felt fragile. 

“That counts as enjoying Fillory?” A smile, small but genuine.

“Yeah, it’s a fucking blast!” Margo smacks his shoulder. “Look, I’m not saying make any decisions right away. It’s just an option.”

Quentin nods. “It’s nice. To think of options, at least. To have options.”

Margo raises her eyebrows. “Got any others on the table?” 

“No, but I guess me and Eliot can’t be the Baba Yaga’s errand boys forever.” 

Margo _hms_ carefully. “Well, what do you want out of life?”

“Jesus, Margo, I don’t know. Who does?”

“I do,” Margo says.

“High King Margo, the Destroyer. Exactly—what you want out of life hasn’t changed.” This isn’t exactly true—how could it have changed when she hadn’t known to want it, three short years ago? But it’s sweet, the certainty in Quentin’s voice. 

Margo hadn’t known that it had changed for Quentin either, but then again...she looks at him with an open appraisal that brings back a nervous, fidgety Quentin, familiar from— 

“What did you want out of life, back at Brakebills?” Useless to ask what Quentin had wanted, before magic. 

“I wanted to be a magician, and go on quests, and being King of Fillory seemed like a dream come true, but I, uh, sucked at that…”

“You did leave something to be desired as a colleague, yes. You don’t want to be a magician anymore?”

Quentin is quiet for a long moment. “I don’t want to be a magician if—if that’s what being a magician means.” 

He doesn’t have to specify what he means by _that_. The last three years of their lives is the _that_. 

“I don’t think it has to. Minor mendings is a magical discipline for a reason, honey.” She feels a deep welling warmth for Quentin, every time she thinks of that. A refracted light, maybe, of the awe in Eliot’s voice when he’d told her. 

Quentin’s mouth twists—half amused, half deprecating. “Yeah, that’s me. It’s, um, something I’ve talked about in therapy a lot, actually. That I don’t need to—to _do_ anything, to be worthy. I don’t need to be a king, or, or, make some big sacrifice, or save the world.” 

“That’s true.” 

“It’s not that easy,” Quentin says, voice going reedy with his desperation to be understood. “Not for us. We can’t—you’re in Fillory and everyone else is fighting the Library and it’s so hard not to feel like shit for not helping. But I think we have to. Stay out of it. Not forever. But it’s like we have to see if we can. See if we can live out a, a...smaller life. In practice. Long enough for it to stick.”

“Do you think that will make you happy?” Quentin looks at her like she’s grown a second head and yeah, she knows that the diagnosed clinical depression makes it kind of a dumb question, but: “Do you think...what did you call it? A small life? Is that what would make you happy?”

“It could,” Quentin says. “It could. I know—I _know_ it could.”

There’s a. Lot. Lying in that _know_. Best to ignore it for now. “I don’t need to be High King to know myself worthy. As you so astutely recognized, I’ve always known that shit. I just need it to be happy. That makes it different.” 

“Is that what we’re basing decisions off of now? What makes us _happy_?” He’s trying to say the words scornfully but it’s not quite working. Margo can’t quite buy it either, but well—maybe it’s due for a try.

An awkward silence, the first this morning, falls between them. All Margo’s assurances somehow ringing a little hollow. She wonders what to say to him. Maybe that she’s always thought him perfectly useless and she’s loved him anyway. That there’s a small place in Margo’s big world for them, if they want it.

“Fillory has broken plates too,” is what she says, placeholder for the perfect thing to say which will never come, and Quentin smiles. 


	6. Chapter 6

Margo steps through the clock about 9 in the evening on a Tuesday to find Eliot and Quentin cuddled up on the couch watching - _The Shape of Water?_

“Ugh, really, the fish fucker movie?” Janet had watched it. She hadn’t been a fan.

“We’re working our way through the last couple years of pop culture, Bambi. Quentin’s approach is very methodical. We’re on 2017 Oscar candidates.” Eliot smiles at her, and pats the open seat on the other side of him with the hand that isn’t stroking Quentin’s hair.

She doesn’t really think it through, but she clambers over the back of the couch and shoves herself bodily into the space between Eliot and Quentin instead. Well, she makes space. There wasn’t really any before. Eliot looks at her a little weirdly but switches to cuddling her instead, immediately, like instinct or muscle memory takes over. She looks at Quentin, blinking a bit from the sudden disturbance. 

“Hi, Margo,” he says, wry but pleased, seeming genuinely happy at this unexpected opportunity to hang out with her. Margo feels a prick of annoyance that she doesn’t want to analyze right this second, before Quentin smiles sweetly at her. Then she just feels that recurrent pang of gratitude and relief that Quentin is here, alive and well. A throb of affection so acute it’s painful, at the answering tenderness it calls up in her, that particular kind that only Quentin seems capable of drawing out of her that she almost lost forever along with the smile that is its current point of origin.

“Hey, Q,” she says softly, in concession to Eliot shushing them, and reaches up and smoothes down his hair from where Eliot’s hands had mussed it. She instantly ruins her work by putting her hand back in his hair to guide his head down into her lap. 

She finishes the movie with them. Margo Hanson, it turns out, isn’t much of a fan either. Quentin cries, because of course he does. 

*

One day, Eliot waltzes into Margo’s room in the penthouse, _happy_, and wanting to chat. He does this without knocking and interrupts Margo and Josh in a nice, lazy makeout session. Josh looks considerably put out when she abandons this activity to talk to Eliot about his plans for dinner—something stupid and unimportant and thus miraculous—but he’s lucky Margo didn’t ask him to leave the room. 

Later, when Josh says, “Could you maybe talk to Eliot about _knocking?_" Margo knows it’s the beginning of the end. She breaks up with him two days later.

That same evening Eliot appears in what was formerly Margo and Josh’s room while Margo is packing to leave Josh in sole possession, to move into what was Quentin’s room, before he moved into Eliot’s. 

Eliot is carrying a bottle of wine and a carefully sympathetic expression. “I come to nurse you through your heartbreak. It’s about time I got to return the favor.”

Margo remembers: Eliot flinging himself dramatically across her bed in the Cottage to mope about various failures romantic and erotic. 

Margo smiles at him, takes the bottle he waggles enticingly at her. “Sorry, El, but this isn’t your chance. It’s just a breakup.”

The look on Eliot’s face speaks to the fact he doesn’t understand there being any just about it. But he gives her a fond look and says, “Yeah, I know, but well—my understanding of things has been thrown off by you having a boyfriend to break up with in the first place.”

“Yeah,” Margo says, “me too.”

Eliot sits down beside her. “I realize I’m coming shamefully late to this whole saga. Missed the whole show, really. The Josh thing seemed weird, but…”

“You were preoccupied.” This is said without rancor. Eliot had come back from god-possession to find his world totally destroyed—the fact that he’d noticed but failed to care about the fact that Josh was calling her his girlfriend and Margo didn’t have the energy to dissent wasn’t something she could resent him for. 

Eliot sighs, nods. Puts his arm around Margo. “No heartbreak, got it. You still seem like you could use some wine, though.”

“I don’t like hurting him. He’s a good friend.” 

It’s true. Margo hates that she’s hurt Josh worse by letting things continue for so long, too stunned in the aftershocks of the last year to make a decisive break and half-hopping it could settle into a nice friends-with-benefits situation—because pretty soon after coming out of her terrified haze at losing Eliot she had known what a doomed proposition their whole relationship was. Josh wanted something from her that Margo knew she didn’t have it in her to give him, or anyone. She’d known that about herself for a long time, and it was only the titanic force of her grief that had briefly made her grab at the possibility that she’d been wrong and maybe this thing that other people seemed to get so much meaning out of could mean something to her, too, and be enough to offset in some tiny way for what she stood to lose. But then Elliot had said _Bambi_ on that forest floor and that delusion had simply fallen away, like waking up from a dream. 

Eliot makes a sympathetic noise, moves his hand from her waist up to her hair, guides her head gently onto his shoulder. Pets at her. After a few minutes, he says, “Your friend is a pretty special thing to be. If he doesn’t get over it and realize that, fuck him.” 

This is sort of funny coming from Eliot, but it’s exactly what she needs him to say. There’s a long pause, where they just sip at the wine and sit together. Then—

“The thing about Josh is—it was plot convenient grief fucking, but it was grief fucking nonetheless. I had to save his life using my vag, yeah, but honestly it would probably have happened anyway. Or it would have happened with someone. We just have the Quickening to thank for the fact that it wasn’t Quentin. Historically he’s the most likely candidate.”

Eliot puts his hand over his heart dramatically and says, “Never before this moment have I hated Josh Hoberman.”

Margo snorts inelegantly but Eliot goes on, at least half-sincere, “Robbing me of the only way I would have wanted to be memorialized…” and then Margo’s laughing so hard that—maybe some tears leak out, which she knows Eliot notices by the way he keeps talking, ever sillier, and the way he keeps touching her hair.

*

Margo breaks up with Josh, but that leaves the whole ‘werewolf curse’ issue. After, she’s still too busy to really worry about it, but she’s High King again and she can delegate; she puts some manpower on finding a solution or a cure. Things move slowly in Fillory, but she figures even they can figure something out before her Quickening hits, if there’s one to be found. If not, oh well. In the meantime, she’s got an exstensive collection of sex toys and an imagination and it’s a bummer, but whatever. There’s also magical Tinder, where “‘L-positive?’ Y/N” is a necessary component on every profile. Through this Margo meets a hot werewolf chick and fingerbangs her in the gross alley behind the bar and then she takes Margo back to her place and eats her out for hours and it’s great, but she doesn’t get back to Earth much and when she does there’s always a million things going on at once, and getting laid doesn’t top the list.

It turns out not to take that long. Crowned High Kings of Fillory are apparently immune to being transformed into magical creatures. 

“Your Newly Re-Throned Majesty,” Tick Pickwick says, “excuse me for my confusion: but had you not realized this before now? It is my understanding that it has been many months since you and Former Substitute High King Josh had your moment of...intimate congress, during his Quickening, and you have apparently not experienced a transformation at the full moon.”

“Gross, Tick. Wait. Has it been months?” She turns to Fen, who shrugs. “Whatever, I’ve been busy, but now that you mention it, yes, that should probably have clued me in.”

So, that’s that sorted.


	7. Chapter 7

Margo and Eliot are making out on her bed in the penthouse. Julia and Quentin are out at a movie, and Margo and Eliot are pleasantly buzzed and bored and it just sort of happens. It’s nice. It’s so nice, this animal closeness, this physical warmth. Eliot’s face is her favorite, her very favorite face, and why shouldn’t she kiss it? He’s a good kisser. They break apart to breathe and they look at each other, gaze at each other, really, _god_, before laughing their way into another kiss. They’ve been doing it so long Margo’s lips tingle. Doing it not as a prelude to anything else, but for its own sake. 

But, well, Eliot may be well-satisfied in this department, but Margo’s sex life is still leaving something to be desired. She doesn’t realize she’s been rubbing up against Eliot’s chest, the sensation of her breasts rubbing against his chest through the soft fine fabric of his vest and her camisole making her nipples harden and sending a pleasant ache in between her legs, until Eliot pulls back. 

“Uh, Bambi, believe me, this is very nice, but—” Margo expects him to say he’s not in the mood which, cool, she’ll just make him cuddle while she gets mad at _Game of Thrones_, no big, but there’s an awkward, furtive look on his face that’s unfamiliar. 

“Quentin,” Eliot finishes.

It takes a moment for this connection to make sense to her. The sense memory had been so strong that it had worked a magic more powerful than any she might deliberately cast and transported them several years in the past and miles away. Why should Quentin Coldwater have anything to do with this? Then her brain comes back online and remembers that now Eliot is pretty one-track obsessed with Quentin in a honeymoon way rather than the cute-first-year-I-want-to-corrupt way. 

Margo feels a little annoyed but mostly fond. There’s a painful twist right under her ribs at yet another reminder of how different things are now, but she pushes it down, and is about to maybe give Eliot a hard time about how boring he is now and then get up to get a drink refill, but Eliot has obviously read something different into her long moment of buffering, because he disentangles himself from her, rolls over onto his back, and says with all the considerable weight of dramatic pronouncement he can put behind it, “I’ve recently discovered I’m a _monogamist_.”

It still takes a moment for Margo to put everything together. If Eliot’s a monogamist, that means making out with Margo would be...cheating? On Quentin? That seems laughable and kind of impossible, although she guesses, on paper, that would qualify for most people. She’d just always believed she and Eliot weren’t _most people_. 

“Well, sweetie, you know I’ll love you no matter what,” she says, sticky-sweet, but reaching out to give his ear a hard flick for being so ridiculous. She can see his eyes roll from where he’s resolutely kept them glued to the ceiling while making his big announcement, but he turns over to look at her, seeming surprised and a little nervous at her reaction.

“You don’t seem surprised,” he says. Takes her hand in his.

“Not really, honey, no,” Margo says. She would have never thought of it herself, not in those exact terms, but once revealed it makes a certain sort of sense. 

Eliot gives a put-out sigh and says, ”Well, that’s great. It was a whole fucking process for me.” He pauses for a moment, and then follows up with a tentative, “_Why_ aren’t you surprised?”

She can recognize this for the necessary lead-in to whatever he wants to confess. Let Margo tell him to himself, first, and work up the nerve from there. She is going to say something about how disgustingly domestic he and Coldwater have been these last months, how they fucking _cook breakfast together_ and have _movie nights_, but that feels weirdly raw, so she has no choice but to fall back on another open wound.

“You went from 0 to 60, with Mike.” 

“That was the Beast,” Eliot whispers. He flinches a little bit from this, still. She thinks that’s a design flaw, that no matter how much intervening and far worse pain you’ve endured, the preceding hurts don’t totally lose their power. 

“I don’t think it would have worked, if you didn’t want it so much.” She strokes his hair off his forehead with her free hand in apology. He closes his eyes, presses into it, but a spasm of bitter humor twists his mouth. 

“Great, my deeply repressed desire to make an honest man of someone nearly got us all killed. If you had the read on me, oh wise one, why were you so fucking irritating about it?” 

“It was _because_ I knew, asshole. I could see the Instagram posts from your trip to the Saturday farmer’s market from three miles away.” Then again—what a miracle that they can joke about this now, only granted by the new things they can’t bear to joke about. 

Margo doesn’t want to get into it, the seething resentment originating in fear that she’d felt toward Mike. “What made you come to this realization, then?” 

Eliot pauses. “Do you remember what I told you about the mosaic?” 

Yeah, Margo remembers. She tries not to think about it too much. She nods. 

“I told you I turned Quentin down. That I did it because I was afraid. But not why I was afraid. I didn’t know why I was afraid myself, not completely. I thought it was just my bullshit and it was, but part of it was that I’d let my bullshit fuck things up for me before.” 

“You have a lot of bullshit, El. You’ll have to be more specific.” 

Eliot looks like he’s undergoing a root canal. He rolls onto his back again, but doesn’t let go off her hand. “About a year in to working on the mosaic, Quentin and I started fucking, and I was stupidly hung up on him but I thought—for him it’s just because there are no other options. We’re passing the time, we’re friends and we need to blow off steam, but that’s all it is. But Quentin, he—he wanted more and I just. Couldn’t. So I pushed him away, and then he got married to a cute redhead named _Arielle_ and they had a baby and I thought ‘well, asshole, you were right.’ It validated every nasty thing I’d ever thought about myself or him but that’s because I’d set up the whole experiment to fail. I was very performatively _fine_ about it, but—not really. Then she died, and me and Quentin were together, but we never actually—talked about any of it. For literal decades. And we got the big declarations out of the way months ago but that turned out to be the easy bit. We hadn’t really, you know, _defined our relationship_”—Margo is relieved to still hear a little bit of genuine disgust in his voice, at this—“and it was eating me up, and then finally I had to work it all out and declare to Quentin that I just wanted it to be me and him. That I didn’t want anyone else to have him and I didn’t want anyone else.” 

Eliot has addressed this speech to the ceiling. Margo aches with how many spaces she can sense in this story, with how she could sit here and make Eliot talk to her for hours about this lost life of his and she’d never come close to knowing enough. She would never be part of this. 

“So the specific bullshit, in this case, is your inability to be honest about what you want.” 

Margo thought she knew a lot of Eliot’s issues, but this is actually new—because she’d thought that Eliot had gotten what he wanted and that it looked a lot like what Margo wanted. He wanted to escape his family and where he was from. He wanted to be himself, the self that he’d created, that she’d helped him to create. He wanted to live without shame. He wanted someone to know him totally and love him unconditionally. He wanted to have a very good time. Maybe he still wanted those things. But he’s also a person who found something adjacent to bliss in a tiny Fillorian shack. 

“Something like that,” Eliot says. 

“Wow, this is all very emotionally advanced of you, I’m sure it made Quentin so horny.” 

“Yeah, well, there’s no way I could ever compensate Crystal adequately for the literal weeks of agony this took”—right, Crystal, his therapist—“and, yes, I had to say it all to Quentin first, so this is nothing.” 

“Well, what did Quentin say?” 

“He looked at me like I was nuts and said he’d never assumed otherwise and I got defensive and it was a fight and it was all a very draining and horrible process, but we worked it out and—” there’s a little gross private smile on Eliot’s face, oh god. 

“You got so hard for monogamy you had to make tender love to your _boyfriend_.” 

Then there’s a moment where Eliot grabs one of the ridiculous circular pillows on the bed and attempts to mock smother her, and she retaliates by tickling him; he’s ridiculously ticklish and she knows all his weak spots. It’s dangerous to get his freakish gangly limbs flailing like that, but life is boring without any risk. After, they lie still, breathing hard, giggling like children. Margo’s blood is pleasantly hot, drawn close to the surface of the skin. She thinks the conversation is over, but Eliot clears his throat, and when she looks at him says, “So, yeah, Bambi, it’s just—” 

Margo rolls her eyes. “You shall know none other than Quentin Coldwater, I got it.” 

She slides her foot up under the hem of his pants to scratch at his calf to get him to squirm with disgust, grins at him. Then, soft and earnest, “You want this to work, I get it. I want that too.” 

Eliot squints at her, still a little suspicious, which is insulting. “Again, with Mike, you weren’t this...” 

She doesn’t want to get into it, but she can better understand now—the terror she’d felt at the possibility that she might someday not be the sole center of Eliot’s world anymore. That has come to pass and she’s realized that it wasn’t anything to fear at all, she has not and will not be supplanted, that Eliot’s overflowing heart has room for her and Quentin both, blah blah blah. 

“Mike was some rando. This is _Quentin_. He’s kind of been a joint project from the beginning. I’ve carefully crafted him to fit my standards, he makes me coffee in the morning without me having to ask.” She wonders if Eliot, monogamist, will take this weirdly. Does Eliot, monogamist, feel weird about the fact she’s fucked Quentin? But he’s just smiling, fond. 

But she wants him to understand how much she means this. As much as she’s ever meant anything. “Eliot, I just want you to be happy. Both of you.” 

Margo can’t give herself that much credit for emotional advancement. She might have been a real twat about Eliot’s shacking up with Quentin Coldwater and leaving her to fend for herself in Fillory if he hadn’t almost died and Quentin hadn’t actually, literally died. As it is, this small twinge of yearning for a time she wouldn’t even return to if she actually had the chance is such an unimportant thing. 

“I know, Bambi,” Eliot says, and presses his lips to hers. 

* 

The day after next, Margo is sprawled across the couch in the living room when Quentin comes and sits down at the other end. When she looks up from her phone, he says, “So Eliot told me about the other night.” 

Margo gives him a long, steady stare. She refuses to apologize, and it’s really between Q and Eliot, so she doesn’t really understand why they’re having this conversation. 

“Um, we got—we got in a fight. Kind of.” 

Oh, Jesus Christ. If he needs assurance from her too, that’s annoying, but she can oblige. “Well, it won’t happen again. Scout’s honor.” 

“Oh, uh, no. I wasn’t mad. Eliot got mad at _me_.” 

Margo sits up. Interesting. “Why?” 

Quentin squirms, scratches at his neck. “Well, he told me what happened—” 

“Nothing happened,” Margo interrupts. “We didn’t even hit heavy petting, he’s so dramatic.” 

Quentin huffs in annoyance, smiles at her. “I mean, yeah. That’s what I said. That he had nothing to apologize for, I didn’t care. He was like, well, what about what we talked about?” 

“The monogamy,” Margo says, in tones some old biddy on Downton Abbey might say _the influenza_. It makes Quentin laugh, which was the goal. 

“I told him it didn’t bother me, and he assumed I meant I didn’t care whether he was with other people and he got offended.” 

“Oh, yeah, that would hurt his feelings.” 

“Yeah and he’s fucking mean when his feelings are hurt.” Quentin sounds way more fond about this particular attractive facet of Eliot’s personality than she feels. “But we worked it out. I hadn’t been clear on what I meant, which was just—I didn’t care, if it was you.” 

“Oh,” Margo says, surprised. “Well, that’s sweet, Q, but I don’t think it’s necessary, it’s not…” 

Margo feels at a loss to explain this. She sighs. “It’s just—we used to fuck, back at Brakebills.” 

They had. Just the two of them, no third person in the bed. Frequently at first, and then with an ebb that felt natural and comfortable, less. Especially in that first flush of love, a straight up honeymoon phase, they were just so into each other that it felt like it would overflow if they didn’t pour it into some physical outlet. Physical affection was so much easier for both of them to give than other kinds. They'd never stopped, though—their lazy Sundays and slow Tuesdays and frustrated Friday nights. Those memories run molten through all the others. Making out while high, Eliot’s long clever fingers getting her off after a disappointing date. His fond eyes never leaving her face, not really getting much out of it, but pleased with her and her pleasure. Margo fucking him with her strap-on. 

Then Mike, Fillory, Eliot’s marriage. It stopped, and Margo missed it in the way she misses everything about those halcyon early days. 

“Yeah,” Quentin says, “I know. I mean, Eliot said, but I also—I used to wonder. About you two. Back in first year.” 

Margo leers at him, delighted. “Oh yeah?” 

Quentin is flushing a little. “_Yes._ You were just so—tactile. But then Eliot also was like that with me, sometimes, so I thought, maybe—I don’t know. I was confused.” 

“Poor baby Q,” Margo coos at him. “Was that part of your spank bank rotation?” 

Margo didn’t need Quentin sudden full blown blush to confirm this statement because, _duh._ She likes to think she and Eliot featured in a solid 80% of the student body’s masturbatory fantasies at _least_ once. 

“Yeah, it, um featured,” and wow, Eliot really has liberated Quentin as a sexual being if they are talking about this at 3 PM on a Wednesday without him having a heart attack or crawling underneath the sofa. “Second place, to, uh—” 

“Eliot dicking you down?” 

Quentin rolls his eyes, tries to tuck his still short hair behind his ear. His dimples make a brief appearance before disappearing again. 

It’s Margo’s turn to sigh. “This was a nice walk down memory lane, but that’s exactly what the other night was. I don’t want to fuck your boyfriend. He definitly doesn’t want to fuck anyone but you. I just miss—I miss everything. From back when things were easy, or seemed like they were.” 

All of this isn’t exactly a lie. It’s probably not quite the truth either. 

“It’s getting easier, though. Isn’t it.” Quentin says, and he’s right; but Margo is thinking about an ease that doesn’t know how easy it is. This easy will always know exactly how hard it actually is, which makes it better and worse at the same time, somehow. 

Quentin is looking at her in a speculative way, but all he does is shrug and ask her if she wants to come walk the puppy with him. She’s heading back to Fillory later that night, so she says yes, walks with Quentin to the park, where they meet Eliot coming back from a doctor’s appointment and throw the ball for the puppy that’s really just a dog now in the cold bright air of the year on its way out. 


	8. Chapter 8

The first time Eliot and Quentin come to Fillory is for Margo and Fen’s coronation.

They arrive a couple of weeks before, and as a welcoming present, Fen officially divorces Eliot. Filloarian divorce is a new invention Margo and Fen have laboriously hashed out over the course of months, Margo on the magic side (well, she _delegated_, Alice was brought in as a consultant), and Fen on the cultural side. Therefore former High King Eliot Waugh and current High King Fen are the inaugural divorce of Fillory, and via some creative retrofitting of traditional Fillorian marriage proposals the form it takes involves an alpaca declaiming in verse. Then again, it’s mostly symbolic. 

“I’m pretty sure we weren’t married anymore? I mean, you were banished by Ember, and then you died, I mean, kind of, and I officially mourned you and you’ve been, um,” Fen glances quickly at Quentin here, “committed to someone else for a while, but I figured it was better to be sure.” 

“Thank you, Fen,” Eliot says, painfully earnest. 

When Fen is called away to deal with the deluge of matrimonially distressed Fillorian citizens at the gates of the Castle, Margo sighs and says, “The single regret I have about all this is that I won’t one day be able to dramatically declare to you: ‘Eliot, I’ve just fucked your wife.’”

“‘Eliot, I’ve just fucked your ex-wife’ is way hotter,” Eliot says, even more serious than before. A beat. “Wait, what?”

Much later that evening, Margo finds Fen sitting at a table scattered with near empty wine bottles (it had been Eliot’s idea to invite his newly freed brethren in and throw them an impromptu divorce party, and then he and Josh had made it a smashing success which is to say it has devolved into something that is half orgy, half group therapy session.) Fen’s head is propped on a bent arm, and she’s looking too wistful for Margo’s liking.

Margo tops off Fen’s glass, and her own. “Why so blue? I think we can safely say High King Fen’s First Fillorian Divorce Decree is a hit.” 

Fen smiles at Margo, takes her glass back. Margo sits down across from her. This table is off in an alcove and the strains of revelry come distant, cushioned. She thinks Eliot and Quentin have gone to bed. Eliot had a lot of fun orchestrating the proceedings, but she doesn’t think he’s drinking so much himself, these days. 

Margo, personally, is feeling fucking fantastic. This decree, and getting things settled enough that the coronation feels like a true celebration and beginning and not papering over the cracks with pageantry has been hard work, and not the kind of hard work that comes naturally to her. She’s good at taking down assholes and leading armies, less great at so much of the stuff necessary for ruling a kingdom trying its hand at peace. But she’s getting better, maybe, she’s trying so fucking hard, and here finally is the evidence, proof that she can _do this_ that she would never admit to needing but that’s really fucking nice to have anyway. 

“It’s just weird, being _divorced_.” The word, strange in Fen’s mouth.

“Hot, though,” Margo says, with a smile that’s more fond than lecherous at the moment. She’s surprised to recognize the warmth she’s feeling as the steady glow of familiarity. The talking bear band (_mean_ fiddlers) playing the approximately 200th rendition of The Kiss of King Fen’s Blade this evening is new but—drinking with Fen in the evening, talking—that’s how most of Margo’s days end, now. 

“It shouldn’t be weird, though. Not weirder than our marriage was. We were never—never married in a real way. I’ve always known that. Still.”

“It was your entire destiny to be married from literally before birth. No wonder you feel weird.”

Fen nods, but she’s tracing a finger around the rim of her goblet, eyes distant. “You know—I knew that someday I might have to marry a stranger from another planet. And you might think that would make me naive. But it had the opposite effect. Maybe at some point I had some daydream about a handsome king sweeping me up, but by the time you and Eliot actually showed up that was long gone. I knew I was more likely to end up in something miserable than something happy, and most likely something in the middle. So I knew—I couldn’t just wait. I mean I had to just wait, but I had to make a life that meant something. That’s why, when Baylor…”

Then Fen trails off. Right, that. Margo rolls her eyes. “The skills from your days as a terrorist proved extremely useful during our own highly colorful and much sung of rebellion, so there’s no need to be precious about it.”

“As a freedom fighter,” Fen mutters under her breath, rote. Margo grins at the familiar back-and-forth of this well-trodden not-argument—Margo feels free now to kind of love this part of Fen’s past now that Fillorians United have finally been brought over fully to Team Margo-and-Fen during their participation in the coalition to defeat the Dark King, pacified by a greater mutual enemy and the fact that not only a native-born Fillorian but one of their former comrades has taken the throne. 

But Fen’s lips quirk a little, before she goes on. “I thought that even if I had no choice about who I’d be married to or when, I’d have a choice about what I could _do_ with it. It would be a chance to help Fillory, to shape it. But I couldn’t just wait around for something that might never even happen. I had to start, and that’s what Baylor offered.”

“Something bigger,” Margo says. Chest tight. 

Fen nods again. “So when it turned out that Eliot was the High King, that he was the one I was going to marry, I felt lucky. Because he’s good, and he cares, and I knew he didn’t want to marry me but I thought that even if it was never _real_ at least we could try to build something together.” 

“Then we mostly ignored you.” Wry. Maybe Margo can’t apologize, but she can be big enough to acknowledge it. 

Fen shrugs. “Yeah, mostly. But it’s not just that. Even if you had been begging for my advice, you can’t_—_a person can’t live on duty alone.” 

“No,” Margo says softly. 

“You know, I’d never thought about if I _wanted_ a family?” Margo can’t quite follow Fen’s train of thought here, but she’s obviously locked in to something, gaining speed as she speaks. “I mean, what I wanted just didn’t come into it. It was a part of the deal. But. I thought. When I found out I was pregnant. _‘Oh, maybe this can be it.’_ I’d have done anything for Fillory, but Fillory didn’t seem to need me that much. And that’s what family is—something you’d do anything for. That’s what I’d been raised to believe but for_—_ I _felt_ it, when I found out...”

_Eliot’s your family_. The only way Fen could make sense of what Margo had_—_what Margo had a role in taking from her. The way that Fen could maybe bear to even fucking look Margo in the face, most days, much less rule a country with her, and laugh with her over wine in the evenings. _Eliot’s so much better than _family_. _Jesus. 

Margo doesn’t think about this. Doesn’t let herself about think about it, if she’s flattering herself. It hasn’t been quite real to her. It—_selling Fen’s fucking baby to the Fairy Queen,_ Jesus—existed in Margo’s emotional landscape as the thing that had once made Eliot look at her like he had never known her at all. 

It is real to Fen. Margo looks at Fen and sees how real it is to her in every line of her body but the thing is—she still can’t apologize for it. There is something so false to Margo about apologizing for something you would do over again. If Margo could click her fingers and launch herself back in time several years, to the throne room in Whitespire when...well, she guesses she wouldn’t make the same choice, because she would have the foreknowledge that Eliot was about to save his own sweet self not through any sense of self-preservation but through his desire for dick. But the essential emotional truth doesn’t change. If she had been given the choice between Eliot’s life and the life of an unborn baby, Eliot wins. Every time. It had to, especially back then when Eliot wasn’t even actively invested in preserving his own life most of the time. 

So she couldn’t apologize for it, not to Fen, not here as Fen looks anywhere but at Margo’s face. Had she ever apologized? She thinks that _maybe_ she had, to Eliot, before he had her frog-marched to the dungeon. Maybe. She can’t remember. She hadn’t meant it then either. What she had been sorry for, so sorry, sorrier than she’d ever been in her life, was that Eliot _wouldn’t look at her_, and back then she was willing to fucking _cheat_ to make him. 

Margo doesn’t think it had been that real to Eliot either. Margo’s betrayal had been real, but not the baby herself, not real like it is to Fen, in her body and in her blood and in her bones. Margo thinks of the way Eliot says the name of Quentin’s son, his son, who lived and died an impossible life a hundred years before any of them were born and thinks maybe it just needed time to—settle, for him. To take up permanent residence, to gain mass. 

Margo takes a breath. Lets it settle. Babies are still an abstract concept Margo, so—not that. But Fen’s kid, Eliot’s kid, Fen and Eliot’s kid, _fuck_. Thinks of a girl, almost a woman, with Fen’s eyes, her smile, and Eliot’s perfect nose, his height, their heart and bravery and fucking _goofiness_, thinks of things that don’t come from genes, but would come from the impossible gift of having Eliot and Fen as parents—her absurd fashion sense, the ridiculous number of knives secreted on her person and no need to use them because she is loved—loved, loved, _loved_, not least by _Margo_ and—what would Margo have, to give her? The confidence to use the knives, maybe. The knowledge she had a right too, and a duty—in her own defense, in her parent’s defense, but she’d never fucking need to because Fen and Margo and Julia and Alice and Kady are trying to make a world where she _wouldn’t fucking have to_ and o_h god_—Margo nearly doubles over, as she lets herself _feel _it, and feel it, and feel it, for the first time. 

Fen is still not looking at Margo. So Margo looks at _her_. _Looks_ at her—at the side of Fen’s face, at the delicate arc of her neck, and Margo lets everything she feels show on her face, for a few cracked open moments. There on her face to see. Margo reaches out. Touches Fen’s hand. And says the only thing she can, something she means right down to the core of her, something she should have said a long fucking time ago: “Fen, I’m so sorry your baby died.” 

Fen doesn’t look up. But she slides her hand into Margo’s. Laces their fingers together. Squeezes.

*

The coronation is a success. It’s not a huge affair; an ostentatious drain on the treasury after Fillory’s years and decades of strife doesn’t work with the image they want to send. But it’s like a promise: of stability, of purpose. There is a ceremony made of traditions from every corner of Fillory, speechifying by the leaders of various factions, an orangutan playing an organ, everything as dignified and stately as Fillory ever manages. And then champagne, imported_—_apparently the Library’s wine cellars were well-stocked and have been, uh, _liberated, _along with their Penny, alive and well and grousing about his return this particular godforsaken shithole_—_is flowing in the town square of every village in Fillory, fireworks explode across the sky, and they _party_. 

Margo dances with everyone: obviously the rest of their crew from Earth has shown up and is magnificently drunk and she gets at least one go in with all of them, with various Pickwicks ages approximately three to ninety, and is taught what seems to be a Fillorian equivalent of a waltz by an emu. 

As the night tunnels down towards morning, Margo takes a break from the whirl to slump against a pillar. Takes in the warm flicker of infinite candles, glinting off jewelry and the tiled floor whose painstaking gloss still winks out beneath the frenzied movement of feet and the party detritus that litters the floor, off bottles and glasses, off the sheen of sweat on laughing faces. 

Margo can feel the sweat on her own face, in the very slightly cooler air out of the crush. There’s not enough of a breeze to get any relief but the temperature difference is just enough to become aware of her full grossness, under her arms and the backs of her knees and her upper lip where she can feel her mouth tugging helplessly into another smile. She senses someone sidling up to her left and turns to find Eliot there. Just as sweaty as she is, eyeliner holding strong with the aid of magic but the product in his hair giving up the ghost. Margo feels her smile bloom larger and she twines her arm around his waist, obeys instinct and tucks herself against his side even though they’re truly so, so gross.

Because of course Eliot and Margo have danced the most, and with each other, mostly. Eliot had spent much of the evening trying unsuccessfully to get Quentin to dance and had been kind of put out but trying to hide it when it was only Julia that finally succeeded. But Julia, having taken her rightful best friend due in a truly atrocious display that feels like it could have caused a diplomatic incident if several unclear factors had been slightly different, had munificently spun Q into Eliot’s arms with a laugh and a wink. Margo had looked up from teaching Fen to grind (difficult to do to the tune of a lute, but by this point in the evening enough alcohol had been consumed to get Quentin dancing, so you can guess how much Margo cared) to catch sight of them on the edge of the room, seeming to slow-dance but really just sort of swaying together, Eliot’s mouth at Quentin’s ear. 

Now she and Eliot sway gently together, sticking to each other in a way that’s both deeply unpleasant and somehow satisfying. “Where’s Q?” 

“In bed after I got as much water in him as he’d let me.” 

“Who says romance is dead?” 

Eliot snorts. His eyes are bright, and his face looks tired, a good honest physical exhaustion. Margo beams up at him and Eliot beams down at her. Strokes her hair back off her face, grimacing a bit and disengaging. An unusual feeling of relief, at putting some distance between their bodies. 

They look out at the party for a minute, and then Eliot looks back at her. An ever more familiar expression coming over his face: some gut-level pull towards earnestness. 

“It’s really something, Bambi.” He makes a wide-armed gesture, palm open, at the throne room, at the rest of Fillory. 

“Yeah,” Margo says quietly. “Isn’t it?” Looking out on her _home_ and reaching over for Eliot’s other hand, to rest palm against damp palm. 

Eliot makes a small noise of dissatisfaction. “No, I’m saying—_you’re _something. You’re incredible. I think always knew—it should have been you.”

At that it’s Margo’s turn to make a noise of disbelief at Eliot’s bullshit. She turns back to him. “You,” reaching up with her free hand to stroke his cheek adoringly, “are so full of shit.” 

“OK, maybe I didn’t know. I know _now_, though. You deserve it. You’re going to do so much more with it than I ever possibly could.” He’s smiling at her so tenderly, but he looks a little wistful.

“El…” Margo starts but Eliot cuts her off instantly.

“Oh no,” he says with hysterical determination. “We are not letting me make this about my maudlin bullshit. I was just trying to compliment you, so stop being a bitch and say ‘tell me something I don’t know’ already.”

“Hm, no, I think I could stand to hear you tell me a little more about how amazing I am,” and Eliot’s eyes roll and his lips tug into a smile as like two magnets snapping together he reels her back in by their joined hands, perspiration be damned. 

“You are,” he says, fervent, and Margo isn’t too proud to drink it in, the honest awe in his eyes the one thing that can fill a particular desert at the center of her. 

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Margo says, low, a corresponding honesty wrenching it’s way out of her. “Fuck, I’ve—”, (_missed you,_ she stops herself from saying, just in time. Margo isn’t sure exactly what she thinks will happen if she says the words aloud, what she fears she’ll see in Eliot’s eyes or hear him say), “—these past few weeks. They’ve been good.” 

They have. Margo has given Eliot an honorary seat on the council and dared anyone to say anything about it. She’s been very careful to walk a line between making jokes about how very honorary it is, how she mostly expects Eliot to be decorative and provide amusing commentary, and genuinely asking his advice on things ranging from the color scheme of table settings at the coronation banquet to more serious, practical matters, trying to let him know that although she doesn’t want to pressure him there is a door open here, if he wants it. Quentin also seems to have enjoyed himself, jaunting around the villages near Whitespire as a traveling tinker, fixing broken pots and chatting with the locals and reclaiming his childish wonder and shit, and returning to them in the evening tired and satisfied and full of stories that he ends up sharing with Margo and Eliot and Fen and Josh over good meals and shitty wine. It’s been more than good—it's been wonderful.

Eliot nods. “They have. Me and Quentin have been talking and we want to be here more. If that’s—”

Margo’s heart leaps into her throat. _If that’s OK with you_, or something adjacently stupid, is what she expects is about to come out of Eliot’s mouth. 

“I want you here,” Margo cuts in. “Always. But what I said, right after we got Quentin back, that one day I was going to _make you_ come back—“

Margo takes a deep breath. She really fucking hates that she’s about to say this. Character growth is truly the fucking _worst_. But she thinks of Eliot’s unclouded eyes. Him and Quentin swaying together. “You’re happy. Your life on Earth, with Quentin—it’s good for you. I—”

“It has been,” Eliot interjects. “It’s been necessary. But—look. I know you thought it was me being a martyr, staying on Earth with Quentin, before he got it together enough to hear how I felt and I got it together enough to tell him, that it seemed like maybe it was about to be more of the same. Me pining and convincing myself that all I wanted was to be his friend and that it was better that way—”

“That’s not what I thought,” Margo can’t help interrupting. “I believed in you, asshole, I knew you’d pony up eventually. I just wanted to help you along a little. I thought it was _brave_. It’s easy to do your big scary declaration of undying love when you’re high off the revelation. It’s a lot harder to wait it out.” 

Eliot is now blinking very rapidly, but Margo is frustrated because this isn’t actually what she means, what had made her feel like she had to be the protector of Eliot’s happiness, if he wouldn’t be. She doesn’t know how to express it, the humility that almost could bring _her_ to tears, at the patient way Eliot had just—been there for Quentin, made him eat and walked him to therapy and crawled into bed with him on nights he couldn’t sleep and been ridiculous enough that Quentin could do nothing but crack one of his heartbreaking smiles in the face of it. The way he’d given of himself totally, with no thought of reward, because this was the reward. For simply—Eliot being Eliot, in short. 

Eliot shakes his head. “Jesus. I’m the worst. This night is about _you_. We can talk about it later. What I'm actually trying and failing to say is that in some ways you weren’t exactly _wrong_ about that. Because, fuck, Margo, I—”

But she doesn’t get to hear what he was going to say, as Fen suddenly bursts out of the last exhausted frenzy of dancers, saying, “Margo, it’s almost dawn, there’s this dance that crowned monarchs traditionally do when—oh, hi, Eliot!—here, come on—” and tugs Margo away be the arm, to dance in the new day with her. 


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Although a chapter count of 11 displeases me greatly for aesthetic reasons, I got more long-winded with my porn than expected and decided to split up the two sex scenes in this story into separate chapters. Which is to say we've arrived at the chapters that merit the fic's explicit rating.

Margo is still not getting it nearly often enough. The whole power dynamic of being a monarch is hot in fantasy, skeevy in theory. It’s a shame, but Margo has been in a real dry spell for like, several years. Daydreams in long hot baths featuring the swathe she and Eliot had cut through Brakebills and several world capitals separately, together, and with one another’s assistance are starting to wear a little thin. This is her excuse for having been a total cunt at the council meeting earlier when she comes to Fen’s room that same evening bearing a conciliatory bottle of Earth wine.

“That’s not a good excuse,” Fen says, after Margo lays out her dilemma. She sounds genuinely annoyed, and sips her wine with a show of unassuaged resentment. Margo feels munificent at Fen’s peevish tone; she thinks it’s a real benefit of their relationship that Fen has started to more easily and unambiguously tell people where to shove it. “I mean, I haven’t, um, _got any_, not since…” 

Margo sits up from where she’s been sprawled across Fen’s bed with a gasp. “Fen...Fen. Are you telling me you haven’t had sex with anyone since _Eliot_?”

Fen flushes. It’s pretty cute. “I’ve been busy, like you! And, and…” 

“Oh, Fen, that’s so sad,” and Fen’s flush turns red and angry. She jumps up from the bed. 

“I don’t need your pity,” Fen says. It looks for a moment like she’s considering storming out of the room, but she doesn’t. Just stands there looking at Margo with shining eyes and clenched fists.

“You do though. I mean, you were a virgin and then you married Eliot and, well.” 

“He—he was. A considerate lover.” Margo feels a rush of sadness at that, for Eliot, for Fen. _Well, honey, you actually have _me_ to thank_ _for that perfectly adequate fucking, but it’s nothing to the real thing. _A tug of heat surprises her but then—not _that_ much of a surprise. It’s not like she hasn’t thought about it.

“I’m sure he was,” Margo soothes. She tangles her hand with Fen’s, and tries to tug her back down onto the bed, but Fen refuses. She doesn’t drop Margo’s hand though, so Margo goes on: “But you deserve a lot better than _considerate_.”

At that, Fen does pull her hand out of Margo’s grasp and spits out, “I deserve a lot better than _pity_, too,” and before Margo can reply, Fen’s mouth is on hers. Close-lipped, clumsy. Margo is too thrown by this to really respond and then Fen is jerking back, wide-eyed and breathing hard. But there’s a defiant tilt to her chin, too, a smug _and what are you gonna do about that, huh? _expression on her face. 

“Oh,” Margo says. 

“Yeah,” Fen says, “_oh_.”

Margo can practically see how quickly Fen’s confidence is set to deflate, how that kiss was the result of months of courage, slowly built up and deployed prematurely in a moment of frustration. It’s on Margo to seize the moment. She stands up abruptly and uses Fen’s surprise, her sudden wariness when Margo grasps her arms, to spin them around so their positions are reversed, Fen on the bed and Margo standing in front of her. 

“Fen, first things first. I don’t pity fuck anybody.” Margo watches Fen look up at her, blinking. Sees her soundlessly mouth the word _fuck? _to herself, and the ripple of her throat moving as she suddenly swallows hard. Margo barely manages to tamp down the grin that her mouth wants to break into. Oh, this is gonna be _fun._

Margo reaches out and traces one finger, along the line of Fen’s throat, and down, down, to her cleavage, then veering right suddenly to skim along the lacy froth of the décolletage of her dress, a deep rose color that is being imitated in the hot splotches appearing on Fen’s neck and chest. 

“Second: you’re hot. I didn’t mean to be condescending.” Margo lets her voice go softer as she continues: “I just meant that you deserve to have good sex with someone who wants to have it with you.” 

“Not even a little condescending?” Fen retorts, but it’s a futile bulwark against whatever has been building here. “Um, and you—you want to? With me?” 

The thread of genuine happiness in Fen’s voice, in her eyes. It’s something more than just flattering.

“You’re a babe, Fen. I’ve thought about it,” Margo says, and Fen licks her lips and visibly brightens with pleasure. Margo could tell her not to get a big head about it, Margo has _thought about it _with most everyone she’s met, which is true but also horseshit because she’s definitely gotten through way more council meetings thinking about Fen than say, Tick. That was literally just once in a kind of fugue state after three hours of sleep the night before, and no one will ever fucking know about it, not even Eliot. So. Also, Fen could stand to have a bigger head about her certified babe status. Well, Margo can help with that. She’s a giver. 

“If that’s what you want here?” Margo asks. 

Fen gives a tiny, hesitant nod, and then a full-throated, confident: “Yes, that’s what I want,” and Margo lets her filthiest, most predatory grin show on her face, and indulges herself by pausing a moment to observe the way Fen’s eyes dilate and her breathing quickens, and then she buries her hand in Fen’s hair at the base of her skull and kisses her. 

A little whimper escapes Fen’s mouth, and her mouth opens instantly to Margo’s, yielding and hot. She kisses Margo back hungrily, and her hands settle at Margo’s hips, grip tight as she opens, opens, lets Margo’s tongue into her mouth. Margo rests her knee on the edge of the bed between Fen’s falling open thighs. Margo’s bare knee can feel the heat at the center, even between the fabric of Fen’s gown and whatever’s beneath it. Fen moans, loud. 

Margo moves her hand from Fen’s hair along the silky skin of her shoulder blades. Margo had come to Fen in the late evening when she was only in a light gown for sleep, nothing underneath after all, and with an easy flick of her fingers Margo has slid the fabric off her shoulders, the soft rustle of the fabric as it falls and pools at Fen’s waist loud in the sudden silence from Fen, taut and expectant at being so exposed. 

Margo pulls back. Looks at Fen’s slick mouth, the pulse hammering fast in her throat. Down, to get a nice eyeful of Fen’s lovely tits. 

Margo asks, “OK, honey?” brushing Fen’s breasts with just the tips of her fingers. At Fen’s satisfyingly breathy _please_, she has an even better handful. Margo thumbs and teases at Fen’s nipples until they are stiff and red and tight, kissing her way up and down Fen’s neck and behind her ear, sucking a mark into her throat, all while Fen writhes against Margo’s knee, inching slowly up till she’s straight up rubbing herself off against Margo’s thigh, giving out hot little gasps the whole time until she pushes Margo’s head away from where she’s working at giving Fen a hickey—tacky, but Fen didn’t have any classic Earth high school experiences, so Margo’s just trying to do her due diligence, here, and paws at Margo’s robe until she gets Margo’s breasts freed and has to pause a moment to just—take them in, in slack-jawed appreciation, before with more gentleness than anything else so far this evening, she licks with the flat of her tongue over Margo’s nipple and then sucks it into her mouth with a reverent groan. Margo takes one hand from Fen’s breast to palm the back of her head, clenching her thighs together at the force of a sudden pulse in her pussy, and says “Oh, that’s so good, baby,” with a laugh. Margo is so keyed into Fen and this moment she can feel the way her thighs are tensing around Margo’s leg, how incredibly wet she is and how she’s suddenly trembling and growing impossibly wetter, Jesus, she’s about to come from humping Margo’s leg and _fuck_, why has Margo not been doing this for _months_? 

Margo moves her leg back, and takes her hands off Fen’s breasts, and Fen whines. Margo could make fun, but she’s distracted by wet empty sympathetic clench of her own cunt. Fen is a fucking fantastic sight—purpling bruise on her neck, pinked up, throbbing tits, the wetness between her legs soaking the fabric of her gown dark. 

Margo takes a deep breath. Slams on the breaks. Tries to regain control of the evening. She’s so hot at the idea that she’s going to be Fen’s first good lay. She wants to make it good, so good. She _maybe_ gets a little where Eliot was coming from with the virginity thing, after all, although this particular virgin had tragically been unable to do it for him. Luckily she’s really doing it for Margo. 

She touches Fen’s swollen mouth, thinking. The pink tip of Fen’s tongue darting out to taste Margo’s fingers as she says, “Margo, _please—_” but Margo interrupts her.

“What did you like?”

Fen’s brow creases in confusion. “What did I like about what?”

“Sex. Which, as you took care to point out to me, you’ve had.”

Fen actually shakes her head, as if clearing away cobwebs. “With Eliot?”

“Mhm.” Margo wasn’t, for once, thinking of Eliot. She was thinking about what Fen had learnt enough of to miss, that gave the edge of knowledge to her hunger. What got her going, when she touched herself at night.

“He was, um—really big.” But then Fen looks mortified, like she’s offended Margo somehow, stutters out, “Not that that’s—that’s not…”

Fen trails off in the face Margo’s pleased grin. Oh, she fucking knew it. Fen would have no fucking idea, what Margo could do. Margo feels a sweet rush of power, at that. There had often been an element of competition, in Margo and Eliot’s shared seductions, but that’s not exactly what she’s feeling here. She feels—protective, and strong. Poor, poor Eliot and poor, poor Fen, but that was all over now, because Margo was here to take fucking care of it. 

Margo waves her hand, breezily dismissing Eliot and his huge cock from the room. Although Margo’s wishes in life essentially boil down to 1) people backing out of the room, bowing, while they made haste to do Margo’s kingly bidding and 2) Eliot walking into the room she was in, if he came in right now, she’d throw a pillow at him. She’d lock the door and tell him to go cry about it on Quentin’s dick, she’s got better shit to do and he’d just hold her back. “Eh, mine’s bigger. Well—a couple of them, anyway.” 

Fen makes a small, pained noise of aroused recognition at that. Margo’s smile widens. Yeah, that’ll be a good time. 

“Nevermind. Later.” Margo grasps Fen’s gown where it’s bunched around her hips, urges, with a squeeze of Fen’s ass, for her to lift herself up so Margo can shimmy it down her leg and toss it over her shoulder. Margo manhandles Fen up the bed, till she’s lying back among her pillows. 

Margo kisses her again, and again, and Fen melts into it, before pulling back and panting out, “Margo, I want to see you,” and Margo sits back on her knees and with a showy flourish pulls her nightgown over her head and flings it in the general direction she remembers throwing Fen’s.

Margo arches her back, tosses back her hair. She knows she looks good, enjoys watching Fen’s eyes dart from her breasts to her cunt to her face, enjoys more letting her eyes rake a slow path down Fen’s body, face to breasts to soft belly to the tangle of brown curls damp between her legs. Fen gets a little shy when she’s reeled herself back from her own horny appraisal of Margo to tune in to Margo’s attention on her. Tries to put her knees together, but can’t because Margo is in the way.

Margo _tsks_ in disapproval. “None of that, sweetness,” she says, and with a hand on the outside of Fen’s thigh urges her to let her legs fall open wider. Margo lets her eyes rest on Fen’s glistening cunt, her drenched inner thighs. Feels the flesh of Fen’s hip shiver under her palm, the moment stretching and vibrating with awareness of where they are touching and have touched and where exactly Fen wants Margo to be touching her.

“What do you want?” 

Fen sighs in annoyance, even as she bites her lip and squirms. “Don’t you _know_?”

“I want to hear you say it,” Margo says. Then, softer, like she’s sharing a secret: “It’s nice to say it.” 

A cloud passes over Fen’s face, then. Some unpleasant memory that Margo doesn’t have access to welling up in her eyes, surfacing a moment and then fading away again. Fen props herself up on her elbows, sets her chin, and says, “Margo, I want you to fuck me.” 

No please, no demurring. Margo laughs, and as the moment of anticipation snaps leans over Fen and puts her hand where she and Fen both want it, cupping Fen’s pussy in her hand. That incredible warmth, that wet, “Fuck, you’re soaking,” Margo says, and Fen whimpers out, “Oh my _god_,” as her elbows give out from under her and her head hits the pillows with an audible thump. 

Margo traces the seam at the core of Fen, and then parts it with her finger, and Fen opens, opens, for Margo, and she is, she’s _so_ wet, sopping, that it’s easy as anything for Margo to fit two of her fingers inside the blood-hot velvet clutch of her, _fuck_. Fen is keening, screwing herself down onto Margo’s fingers as they kiss sloppily and Fen is saying _please, please,_ and Margo doesn’t know what she wants except maybe—_more_, she’d taken Eliot’s big cock and she can take a third of Margo’s fingers, she can take it all, whatever Margo or Fillory or the sadistic uncaring universe throws her at her and carry it as far as Margo needs her to, without putting it down, and the least Margo can do is fuck her like she so sweetly demanded, so Margo pushes a third finger into her and fucks her with them, as Fen gasps out, “It’s not all I want, I—I want. I want...” and it’s not encouragement Fen needs, not when she’s so wound up, she just literally doesn’t have enough breath to get it out but Margo tries to help her along anyway, says, “What do you want, honey? I’ll give it to you,” and Fen says, “I want—my mouth on you,” and fuck Margo wants that too, Fen’s eager mouth on her pussy, almost as much as she wants to get her mouth on Fen’s, which she wants badly enough that she considers moving down the bed, so she can tongue at where her fingers disappear into Fen’s body, kiss at the stretched taut rim of Fen around Margo’s fingers but no, no—there’s not time, as she thinks this and rubs and rubs at Fen’s swollen clit with her thumb Fen’s whole body seizes up and she comes with a honest-to-god scream, her cunt vise-tight on Margo’s fingers and her thighs clamping around Margo’s arm and Margo actually comes harder than she has in years rubbing herself off against Fen’s hip as Fen lies as if felled by the force of her orgasm. 

Usually Margo would consider it bad form to let a beautiful girl leave her bed without at least three orgasms and a tragic lack of self-respect on her part to herself leave without an equal number from anybody, but Fen is totally fucked out after round one, this time, and also way too fucking clingy to kick out of bed. Not that Margo is inclined too, _god_. It's not even her bed.

So, that’s how Margo has come to this pass in her life, lying back in Fen’s bed with Fen’s head on her breasts and Margo stroking her soft Disney princess hair as Fen dozes after Margo has fucked her brains out. There are a lot worse places to be. 

But then Fen’s head comes up and she rests her chin on Margo’s collarbone and looks at Margo with her wide, earnest eyes, and shit, Margo really should have known better. With a small twinge in her gut, she admits to herself that it was an act of truly monumental carelessness to fuck Fen without talking about it first. Margo sighs and Fen’s face falls a little bit at the frustration she must read in it, although it’s all self-directed.

“We can’t get a little bit more afterglow before the _so what is this_ talk?” Fen just looks at her steadily, beautiful eyes concerned, and Margo sighs, answering her own question. “Here, let me up.”

Margo gets upright against the pillows, feeling a little better looking down at Fen. 

Fen says, “Margo, I—”

“Whatever you thought was happening with me and Josh, during—that’s not going to happen here.” Margo cuts in before Fen can finish her thought. In the simpler days of Margo’s youth, she might have called this bravery, cutting to the chase, not having time for bullshit, but now she knows it’s as much cowardice as courage.

“Josh?” Fen says, with a tone of near hysterical bafflement, as if Margo is talking about someone she’s never heard of, something that doesn’t exist on the same plane of reality as them in this moment.

“When the Monster—you were kind of me and Josh’s number one cheerleader.” 

“Cheer…” 

“Forget that part. I could practically see you planning the wedding, Fen.” 

“Oh,” Fen says. “Right.”

“But it was never going to happen. It won’t. That sort of thing isn’t for me.”

Fen nods. There’s a look of concentration on her face that Margo finds very endearing—the obvious work Fen puts, sometimes, into trying to understand the things she doesn’t understand. Then Fen sighs.

“I know that now. I knew then, maybe? I just—everything was so miserable, I wanted someone to be happy. I wanted _you_ to be happy.” Fen is pretty brave, so she meets Margo’s eyes again as she says, with a self-deprecating, slightly bitter smile. “I guess I still thought marriage was the thing that made you happy. Pretty stupid, huh? From me of all people.”

“You aren’t stupid, Fen,” Margo says gently. “The idea that’s the only that makes anybody happy, that’s pretty stupid, but—you aren’t stupid, for thinking that. You definitley aren’t stupid if that’s what would make _you_ happy. That’s why I’m saying this now—I don’t want to lead you on.”

Not like she did Josh. Margo wonders what would have happened if she’d ended up falling into Fen’s arms, instead, during that period of grief. She likes to think she didn’t partly because some part of Margo knew Fen was going to be too important for Margo to use her to delude herself.

“I don’t know if that’s what I want.” Fen sounds equally lost and sort of awed about it, “I mean, other than Fillory? I don’t know if that sort of thing is for me, either.”

“Well, you’ve got time to figure it out.” They all have so much time. Margo is starting to believe that.

“So, us—it’s just sex? Uh, is it sex?” Fen follows up, squinting as she tries to make sense of the final sentence. A smile tugs at Margo’s mouth, even as she feels a pang at the studied indifference in Fen’s voice, at how wrong she’s gotten it.

“That was definitely sex, but no—not _just_ sex.” Margo reaches out and tucks Fen hair behind her ear and Fen smiles at her. “We’re friends, and we have sex. If that’s something you’re into.”

“Um, yes,” Fen breathes. “I’m into it.” 

“That’s pretty much my favorite category of person. For the record.”

“Friends you have sex with?”

“Yep.”

“Oh,” Fen says, blushing again for no reason Margo can see. “I’m glad to be in your favorite category, then.”

“Only if that’s what you want, Fen. You can have time to think it over.”

“No,” Fen says, quickly. “I don’t need that. But does that mean you’ll sleep with other people?”

Fen doesn’t sound upset by this, just curious. Margo looks at her speculatively. “If I can ever manage it, sure, but my recent track record isn’t promising.”

“And I can sleep with other people?” 

“Why, Fen,” Margo says, putting her hand over your heart. “Are you going to give me the greatest gift of all and tell me that I have initiated your slut season?”

Margo means it totally. Fen’s eager, slutty energy is too priceless a resource to hoard. To release it on the world would be a pleasure as well as a service. 

“My...what?”

Margo rolls her eyes, but she’s laughing. “Yeah, sure, you can do whatever and whoever you want, if you can manage it. I mean, you’re cute and a good lay and shouldn’t have problems but then again I am incredibly hot and the best ride of anyone’s fucking life, and look at me.”

Although, it would be just Margo’s luck, that Fen will cut a swathe through Fillory and further and leave Margo to the lonely comforts of her bath again. Hidden fucking depths, this one. Margo would fucking kill the person that gets Fen to ride their face until she cries so Margo absolutely has to be that person, but obviously she can’t just _say_ that. Instead, she gives the game away with slightly more dignity. “First, though, to inaugurate what is sure to be our beautiful co-rulers-with-benefits relationship, you aren’t leaving this bed for three days.”

Fen smiles, probably seeing right through Margo. But that’s okay, she can have that one, Margo thinks, magnanimous as she leans back against the pillows and smirks. “Did you mean what you said, about wanting your mouth on me?” and everything is as it should be, as Margo feels that delicious rush of comforting power as Fen’s eyes go dark, and she nods, and her tousled head moves down, and down—


	10. Chapter 10

They’re at the penthouse one night. They have it to themselves; they’re in the living room and the music is on and Margo and Eliot are dancing to it—Margo attempts to get Quentin to dance and then Eliot joins in but he actually succeeds. Quentin is awful, and it’s so sweet and silly and it goes on and on in that weird way time can bend when you have nothing to do but enjoy yourself and nowhere to be but exactly where you want to be, which is where you are. When they’ve finally worn themselves out and collapse on the couch, Quentin leans over and kisses her. 

It’s not particularly chaste but it doesn’t last long, either. Quentin pulls away to look at Eliot, and Margo follows suit. She can’t quite parse the look on his face. There’s an amused tilt to his mouth. He and Quentin share a long look. 

Margo gets her hand in Quentin’s hair and tugs, and he turns back to look at her, says, “You know, I really didn’t get to enjoy that night. Um, when we…”

“I know the night of which you speak, yes,” Margo says, amused. She gives his hair another little jerk and his eyes go dark. Had Eliot told her about the hair-pulling, or had she just divined it because Quentin was super fucking obvious? It was hard to tell sometimes. “I seem to remember you enjoying yourself just fine.” 

“Yeah,” Quentin says. Licks his lips. “But after. It ruined everything, so—”

“And you were a _total cock_ about it, but whatever. Water under so many bridges. Okay, baby Q wants a repeat—but I think you’re about to ruin another relationship, honey.” 

“I don’t—I don’t think so.” Margo and Quentin both turn and look at Eliot. His eyes, on Margo’s hand in Quentin’s soft hair. 

“You’re not allowed to play with others, though.”

“You aren’t _others_,” Quentin says, “You’re Margo. Right, El?”

She has no idea what game Quentin is trying to play. She gets up off the couch, pats his cheek. “This is very cute, but you’ll have to work this out with your boyfriend. Maybe for like, your birthday—” but then Eliot reaches up and pulls Margo down into his lap.

“Hi,” she says, sharply. His eyes are huge, and his throat moves when he swallows. His hand slides up in her hair, still up but long loosened in it’s coiffure with the force of their dancing. “It’s Margo,” he says, directed at Q but looking right at her. 

Eliot kisses her. It’s different from the giggly making out of that other night. A little desperate. One hand on her neck, the other on her hip. Margo returns it. _You almost died_, she thinks. She’s always going to feel that, too. 

Eliot pulls back. “Hi,” he says. Smiles. Margo looks over at Quentin. His eyes are hot, and he looks pleased with himself.

“This about what first year Q imagined?” Margo asks, and Quentin gulps, nervous with both of them looking at him.

“Oh, really?” Eliot says, pretending to be surprised, _please_.

Margo smiles at him, slow and hot and suddenly delighted. Kisses him, different this time. Desperation channeled into the fun of putting on a show. That strange sensation of having slipped sideways into somewhere and sometime else. 

There is familiarity here: kissing for a third person, knowing the picture they made, because they’d carefully and mutually _crafted_ that picture. The joy of performing for someone, and through it performing for the only real audience that mattered, which was each other. It’s a lie; even if it feels for a moment like they’ve slipped back to Quentin’s first year, that they are those untouchable hedonists inviting that stuttering nervous kid into their shared world of pleasure, Margo is actually the one being invited in. 

They break apart to examine their work and going by Quentin’s poleaxed look, his bitten lip—no, not quite a lie. 

Eliot, too, is feeling it. She hears his gasp as Quentin’s look hits him and with it the feeling of being looked at and seen exactly as he wants to be seen. He’s in his chosen uniform, perfectly put together except for where Margo’s hands have mussed his hair, his red wet mouth. He’s gorgeous, and in his element, and Quentin’s look is hot and overwhelmed—but open and tender, too; the look of someone who can’t believe he gets to look at anything this good. 

“Well, the more things change...” Margo says. “I hope some things have, though. The last time—it wasn’t very...memorable.”

“_Hey_,” Quentin says, keenly sensitive to insult, “we—we were fucked up!”

“Hm, no, that’s not it. You were raw, sweetie. We had to walk you through it.”

“So you do remember it,” Quentin mutters. 

Margo remembers the night with the emotion bottles more than she lets on, but still not a lot. In flashes. This brings one of Quentin desperate to get his mouth on Eliot’s cock, _gagging_ for it, asking, “Can I, _please—_” Margo kneeling beside him, whispering in his ear: _God_, _you want it _bad_, don’t you? Don’t worry, I’ll walk you through it. _Quentin rolling his eyes and saying, peevish, _I’ve done it before, Margo, _trying to prove his statement by sucking Eliot down with more enthusiasm than skill. 

Margo looks back at Eliot. His eyes are huge and dark, and his hand clenches at her hip. She’d bet he remembers a whole hell of a lot of that night. She winks at him.

Back to Quentin, and maybe no other person can look that mortally affronted while having a very obvious hard-on. “No need to get your panties in a twist, Q. El tells me you’ve really…improved.”

Quentin flushes, but not totally with embarrassment. Or not _bad_ embarrassment.

“He’s a quick study, Bambi,” Eliot says. Resting his chin on her shoulder, grinning. 

“Really?” Margo says, with as much amused, scornful doubt as she can muster. It used to be—a lot more, she thinks, but Quentin can’t tell the difference, going by the way he gets redder. He shifts like his pants just got a little bit tighter, which—interesting.

“Hm, well, maybe not,” Eliot says, laughter warm against her cheek. At Quentin’s kittenish little wounded noise, Eliot turns his face into her shoulder under the guise of kissing it but she can feel his helpless smile against her skin. “He’s…dedicated. Conscientious. Enthusiastic. Good at taking instructions.”

“A good boy,” Margo coos, with a smirk, and she can practically see the battle in Quentin’s body, on how to best evenly distribute his blood between his face and his dick.

“The _best_ boy,” Eliot says. His voice is so raw that it feels like something Margo is not meant to hear, except he’s saying it to _her_. Margo almost has to fight the temptation to squirm out of his arms. The mood keeps pinging back and forth between a familiar rhythm and something that makes Margo feel hopelessly out of her depth. Then, right up against her ear, just for her but still loud enough to carry to Quentin: “You should let him show you, Bambi.” 

Margo puts her finger under Eliot’s chin and tilts his head up to make him meet her eyes and what she sees there sends a hot throb straight to her cunt.

“Your very good boy. You wanna show him off?” And Eliot nods, almost sweetly. 

Margo feels like she’s on firm ground again, despite the liquid feeling in her legs when she gets up and walks over to Quentin on the couch. Earlier when he’d kissed her he’d been in the grip of one of his weird Quentinish bursts of confidence, but now as she sits beside him, he fidgets, seems to have trouble meeting her eyes. Margo reaches out and touches his knee, feeling an abrupt downward swoop in her gut. If Quentin decides that whatever he’d decided to put in motion tonight isn’t what he wants after all that’s fair, and his choice, Eliot’s choice. She’ll live. But she feels far less sanguine about its when Eliot had put the brakes on last time because suddenly Margo _wants_, wants something she didn’t even know she wanted but Quentin had somehow known to give, that he had conjured between the three of them.

But then Quentin looks up at her through his lashes and—is he doing that on purpose? he has to know what he’s doing, right?—and no, it’s not hesitation. Margo rolls her eyes, but with a smile tugging unwillingly at her lips, she grasps Quentin by the chin to tilt his head towards her and kisses him.

He squeaks a little, a deeply unattractive sound. He’d kissed her earlier and from the heat in his eyes just now seemed really into kissing for Eliot. But for a moment he seems panicked again, body stiff and hands fluttering. She can’t remember, before—she can’t remember who kissed who first. She can’t remember if he was nervous.

It only lasts a moment, before his mouth opens to hers and he’s kissing her back with enthusiasm. His restless hands settle on her shoulders, prim, even as his tongue is in her mouth. They’re in a weird position that will become uncomfortable sooner rather than later, Quentin sitting facing forward, torso turned toward Margo up on her knees on the couch, facing sideways. He has strain up slightly to chase her mouth. It must make his neck twinge, but it’s not a bad view for where Eliot’s sitting, until Eliot gets up and comes to sit on the other side of Quentin. Puts his hand on Quentin’s neck, right under where Margo’s hand is tangled in his hair, making sharp little tugs to make him gasp. When Eliot’s palm comes to rest against the back of Quentin’s neck, she can feel Q shudder into her, his mouth opening wider, his kisses getting messier. 

Margo pulls back. Looks at them. Tries to remember her lines.

“Not bad. A little sloppy. Luckily Eliot’s into that.” Quentin doesn’t seem to register this, looking a bit dazed and already totally wrecked, but Eliot scoffs. Not directing it to either one of them in particular, she says, “Kiss your boyfriend, baby.”

Quentin turns to Eliot and then they’re kissing, Eliot cradling his face in his big hands, thumb tracing over his cheek. Quentin is artless, eager, licking into Eliot’s mouth with a happy noise but Eliot kisses him with such _purpose_, such weight. Margo’s paying such close attention she can see the lines form around Eliot’s eyes before she registers the way he’s smiling into it and it starts Quentin smiling, mirroring him, and they’re smiling into each other’s mouths, and Margo is smiling too, through the sudden ache in her chest. 

To more comfortably take in the show she swings a leg over Quentin’s hips to straddle him. He starts a little in surprise, not enough to unseat her or to stop kissing Eliot but one of his hands goes to her hip, steadying instinctively. Q giggles as Eliot breaks their kiss with a couple of last nipping, teasing pecks to his lips, and then they both turn their attention to her. They’re both hard. She can feel Quentin hard beneath her and see Eliot hard in front of her and they both want this. Usually, Margo naturally takes charge of any proceedings but here she feels a carefulness that makes her want to wait, to see where they take it. But she doesn’t have to wait long.

“So, Bambi, final verdict?”

“Solid effort. You’re training him well.” 

“Is this—is this really what we’re doing?” Quentin is going for weary but it comes out in a bratty whine.

“Yes,” Eliot says firmly, one finger pressing against Quentin’s lips. “I’m trying to show you off, so behave.” 

Quentin rolls his eyes but there’s also a look of familiar determination coming over his face, and when Margo places her hand on his chest she can feel the frantic pounding of his heart, the rapid rise-and-fall of his chest. 

Eliot hasn’t taken his finger away from Q’s lips, but removes it with a reproving tap when Quentin, going cross-eyed, tries to suck it into his mouth. 

“So orally fixated,” Eliot says, disgustingly fond. “Fortunately for you and us, no matter how critical Bambi’s trying to appear—” (and at this Eliot reaches over to press two fingers against Margo’s breast, as if to emphasize to her the wild rhythm of her own heart) “—he’s good with his mouth. You should let him show you,” Eliot repeats for the second time that night, finally directing it fully at Margo.

Margo’s breath catches. Watching a guy eat Margo out is something Eliot has plenty of experience with but from what she’s been able to gather, he has a whole _complex_ about Quentin and women and the threat Quentin’s attraction to women poses and now here he is calmly proposing to watch Quentin eat her pussy. But when Margo looks at him he’s obviously turned on, and he gives her a wolfish grin, and—well, alright. OK! She turns to look at Quentin, who is looking at Eliot, and watches their eyes meet and hold some totally silent conversation that makes Quentin nod, satisfied with whatever he sees there, and when Eliot asks softly, “Would you like that, baby?” Quentin replies, high-pitched and breathy, “Fuck, _yeah_,” and Eliot laughs, low and pleased, and then they all kiss a little more.

When they pause again, Margo says, “Hey, El, come help me out of this dress.” 

He stands up and comes to stand behind her. Unzips her dress slowly. From this position, with his height, he has to bend over a little to get all the way to the bottom of the zipper, right above the curve of her ass, then he pushes the straps of her dress off her shoulders, one at a time. Peeling off her layers, baring her for Quentin’s gaze. Margo stands up to let the dress pool at her feet, and Eliot, with a squeeze to her ankle to encourage her to kick the dress away picks it up and folds it over a chair because he’s perfect. Then she’s standing before Quentin in her bra and underwear, reveling in the frank appreciation in his eyes.

“You’re so beautiful, Margo,” Q says earnestly, voice very small. Which, _obviously_, but there’s something about the way Quentin says it, something about what she knows of his awed appreciation of beautiful things, that means it carries a different weight than most compliments, that makes it something almost more than a compliment—makes it evidence of Margo’s admission into some small hallowed place in Quentin. Eliot comes back up behind her and snakes one arm around her torso, his palm coming to rest warm against her stomach. Quentin gives a slightly hysterical laugh. “Both of you, you are both so—”

His hand comes up then, hovers, wanting to touch. Eliot is the one that touches for him, following the direction Quentin’s eyes provide, sliding his free hand up to cup Margo’s breast through the lace of her bra, teasing at her nipple. Margo’s head falls back against his shoulder, the movements of his big hand on her sending a slow, tectonic wave of pleasure outwards from that point to her whole body, to the tips of her toes, flexing against the plush carpet. She can’t see Eliot’s face but she knows he’s looking at Quentin too, where he appears about ready to spontaneously combust on the couch, hands having lowered to flex against his still clothed thighs. 

“You can touch too,” Margo says. She goes forward, straddles him again. Eliot unhooks her bra. Quentin’s wide-eyed overwhelm is gratifying, but he still hesitates so Margo picks up his hand and puts it on her tit. Is she going to have to do everything around here? 

Quentin, gulping rapidly, hips hitching, just strokes and strokes at the skin at the top of her breast as if mesmerized. He says, asininely, “Your skin is so soft,” like Margo is the 8th Wonder of the World, and Margo has to laugh at him a little. It just feels weirdly—nice, Quentin’s strong fingers moving so gently against her. Margo feels warm all over. She turns her head to kiss Eliot again, gasping a little. 

Then Quentin says, “Um, guys? Guys,” and when they finally turn to look at him he looks slightly stressed out. “Are we like—_absolutely_ sure that no one is going to be home tonight?”

Margo shrugs. She has only a minimal understanding or interest in the movements of the occupants of the penthouse not currently in the room with her. Eliot says cheerfully, “Yeah, no, not at all,” and Quentin looks a little queasy.

“Maybe we should, uh, relocate.”

“Hm, should we?” 

“I don’t know, El, I think here is fine.” 

“_Guys_. If I’m going to go down on Margo,” Quentin says this with confidence but then looks almost surprised at his own daring, but at Margo’s confirming nod he goes on, more firmly, “I don’t want to do it in the _living room_.”

“Q, we’re fucking with you. Come on,” Margo says, clambering off his lap. She isn’t actually a fan of having her twat on display to anyone who decides to waltz in tonight, which she knows from experience could range from the people who actually live here to random hedges to Todd.

Eliot pulls Quentin up, cops a feel of his dick to make him whine, and then they move to Quentin and El’s bedroom. This is how she finds herself sitting on the edge of their huge bed, lying back between Eliot’s legs with Quentin Coldwater on his knees before her. 

He’s a little nervous again, his hands at the edge of her underwear, fidgety. Eliot and Margo had had fun undressing Quentin and she can see where the slick head of his cock is making an ever growing dark patch at the front of his underwear. She can feel Eliot’s dick against her back, although he’s still mostly clothed—down to his shirtsleeves and pants. 

“I haven’t—I haven’t done this in a really long time. Or much at all at least in this. This timeline? So Eliot might have, uh, oversold—” 

It’s nice to know that at least his Fillorian peasant bride had reaped the full benefits of Quentin’s obvious need to give head in order to live, but they’re getting off topic. She tilts Quentin’s chin up, from where he’s contemplating Margo’s knee, but Eliot takes over before she can say anything.

“You’ve got enthusiasm and Margo’s an excellent teacher. I can guarantee everyone’s going to come out satisfied.” Margo has nothing to add to this, so she just arches an eyebrow and tilts her hips up encouragingly. She _is_ an excellent teacher when the subject is getting her off and she enjoys it—a good thing, apparently, because she’s getting an awful lot of practice recently. Fen had taken up a place between Margo’s thighs like she wanted to buy real estate there. It was incredible and a testament to their deep commitment to their nation that they did anything else lately. 

Quentin nods, breath coming fast against Margo, with the excitement of what he’s about to do, the obvious thrill he gets from trying to please them. He slides her underwear off her hips, leans forward and for a moment seems to just breathe her in, and Margo feels herself getting wetter. She puts her hand in his hair. Eliot kisses her neck and slides his hand down over her body to stop just above her cunt for a long taut moment before sliding further and parting her with his fingers, opening her up for Quentin’s greedy eyes and hungry tongue.

Quentin has little finesse or technique, but he dives like he’s never wanted anything else in life. Buries his face in her pussy, licking broad-tongued from bottom to top, working his tongue into her body. Forgetting all shyness as he grips her ass in both hands to drag her closer to his face, like he wants to fucking crawl inside her. Following her, diligent and laborious and passionate as his casting, as she says, “No, higher...slower...ah, ah right there,” as she tugs him higher by his hair and fingers tangled with Eliot’s shows him exactly where her clit is rather than just letting him sort of hang out in that general region.

There are endless different types of orgasms, and this one is—it’s like Margo can picture a knot—no fuck, make it _several_ knots, one in the pit of her belly and one behind her breastbone and one low in her throat and one behind her eyes—tightnesses that never leave her, things gnarled beyond any hope of her own clumsy untangling, and it’s like—it’s like Quentin and Eliot are easing those closed tense places open, slowly, slowly, and carefully, gently, with nothing but Quentin’s devoted tongue and Eliot’s patient fingers, and Eliot kisses her and kisses her through that steady, tender unspooling until finally, _finally,_ the last one comes unraveled, ends spilling open, free, and she feels it radiate through her whole body as she comes and gasps into Eliot’s mouth, “Fuck, I’ve _missed you_.” 

But that is _not_ what she meant to say, so still trembling and sensitive, she hauls Quentin up so Eliot can lean over and clean her off Quentin’s face. Eliot’s is rubbing his cock along her back, against her shoulder blades, and Quentin’s is right there, so wet, so she thumbs at the head to make him jerk and groan.

Quentin bends down and kisses Margo, and when he pulls back, he says, “So how did I do?” His tone is both dryly making fun of them and also genuinely anxious to hear her answer. She drops a kiss to his—still wet, _fuck_—cheek and says, “Promising start. Room for improvement, but you know what they say, when there isn’t any, is there even any point?”

“Do people say that?” Quentin’s dimples winking into life for a heart-stopping moment, before he says, shy, “Um, good.”

“You’ve got good instincts, kid,” Margo, replies. Then she reels him in by the back of his neck and whispers in his ear, even though she knows and wants Eliot to be able to hear. “What about some quid pro quo, huh? Bet you could teach me a thing or two about Eliot. Sounds like you don’t have any lack of experience there.”

Instantly, Margo hopes she didn’t just make it weird. She doesn’t know the protocol, here. When your best friend’s boyfriend has just eaten you out, is it OK then to make a suggestion to said boyfriend about you sucking said best friend’s cock while he gives you tips? There’s no guidebook for that. She hopes they don’t read it as her taking it for granted that this is going to happen again, because she’s carefully not making any assumptions there. But Quentin makes a small moan, and Eliot shifts against her, and the idea is a good thing, to let exist in this moment, hot with potential and contained in potential.

“Some other time, maybe,” Margo says at a normal volume, before, in a faux-whisper, she says, “I can’t compete anyway. I have it on good authority that you blowing him is basically a religious experience for Eliot.”

Eliot is so fucking gone he doesn’t even offer a token verbal protest, and his eye roll is definitely just for Margo’s benefit. The way he’s looking at Quentin just proves her point. Then he smiles at her and says, “Well, what _is_ the agenda for the rest of the evening?”

“You should fuck him,” Margo responds, so sudden and decisive she surprises herself. Her heart beating harder, with how clearly she can see what she wants now. She knows Quentin isn’t likely to object to this order of proceedings, but she turns to him anyway. He nods and she smiles at him, tucks his hair behind his ear and says, “Yeah? You gonna let Eliot show me how well he takes care of his baby?”

“God,” Quentin says with a shudder. “Jesus Christ,” Eliot says, pressing his face into her hair. 

Margo grins. Claps her hands, feels the familiar urge to command take over her. “No, sorry to disappoint—just me, but I get that reaction a lot. Q, I’m going to finger you open. Get you nice and ready for Eliot’s cock, and then he’s going to fuck you while I watch. How does that sound?”

Margo cups her hand over Quentin’s crotch when she says this last bit, gratified to feel him twitch up into it. Quentin puts both hands over his face and laughs wildly. Eliot leans in to swallow Quentin’s frantic sounds with his mouth, to soothe his hands down his arms, while Quentin keeps one hand over his own eyes as if visual stimulation would deliver some death blow. Then Eliot says: “That sounds fantastic. Sweetheart?”

Quentin removes his hand from his eyes. They are so, so dark. He nods. But Eliot thumbs at one of his nipples, and makes a questioning noise, and Quentin manages to get out, face burning, “Y-yeah. _Yes_.”

Eliot undresses and then they get distracted kneeling in the middle of the bed, Quentin and Eliot rutting together, Margo touching herself, as they all swap kisses, Eliot’s hand on her ass and Quentin now emboldened enough to play with her breasts when he can detach his hands from Eliot’s dick long enough. They’re so turned on but also everything feels slow, honeyed, time stretching luxuriously. Margo pushes two fingers into the wetwarm of Quentin’s mouth and he instantly closes his eyes and _sucks_ and Margo feels a beat of pleasure between her legs. His lashes are incredibly full and dark. _Like a cow’s _is the highly unsexy thought she has. She bets he’s made so many girls jealous, with eyelashes like that. Not her though. Because, well—_Bambi. _She strokes at the inside of his cheek with the pads of her fingers, and his breathing picks up through his nose, he moans around her fingers. Margo looks at Eliot, who is running his hands all over Quentin, chest and thighs and arms and belly like Margo taking on the all-important task of keeping Quentin’s mouth occupied has freed him for a more indulgent perusal of Quentin’s skin, and grins as she removes her fingers from Quentin’s mouth with an audible pop. Eliot groans and bites Margo’s shoulder, hard.

Eventually they get ahold of themselves enough to get Quentin spread out on the middle of the bed. Eliot stretches out at his side. Rubs at Quentin’s drawn-tight nipples, sucks at his neck, whispers things to make him moan, as Margo pushes his knee up so she can press a wet finger behind his balls. 

Then: the heat of Quentin’s body around her. It never gets old, the feeling of another person’s body around Margo’s fingers, enveloping and total. Tightness, easing, as Margo’s fingers draw little whimpers out of him for Eliot to kiss away. The generous give of him. Making space where there was none. Margo, making space, working Quentin open for Eliot’s cock. Quentin, bearing down, with restless movements of his hips. 

Before long, between Margo’s fingers in his ass and Eliot playing with his red, leaking cock, Quentin is panting, “Stop, Margo, I’m going. I’m going to.” Rubbing his hot face against Eliot’s neck, voice thick. 

“Ready for me, baby?” Eliot says, and when Quentin nods Margo removes her fingers, enjoying the way he clenches down around her as if to keep her in him. 

“OK, you two control yourselves, wait a sec.” When Margo returns from washing her hands she’s about to make her way to the armchair where she plans to have the best view, but Eliot grabs her arm and stops her.

“This OK?” His eyes search her face. Making sure everyone is on the same page. She leans up, kisses him on the cheek.

“Perfect.” It’s just what she wants, Eliot is going to give her just what he wants, she can feel it. He smiles at her, touches her face so sweetly.

Margo gets comfortable, throwing a towel she finds hanging over the closest door (_Quentin_) on to the chair before she sits because she plans to enjoy this but she’s not _animal_. Gets settled. Quentin keeps darting looks at her, nervous again, but seems forgets it all with Eliot’s kisses, with Eliot’s fingers pushing into him to make sure Margo got him ready enough.

“How do you want us, Bambi?” Eliot says. She thinks it through, what would be best. Quentin on his hands and knees, Eliot behind, Quentin’s hand working his own dick. Quentin riding Eliot, working his hips, cock bobbing against his stomach. It all sounds good to her.

“Dealer’s choice, El.” 

What she didn’t expect but she guesses should have: missionary. Eliot kneels up between Quentin’s shaking thighs and presses in, in. One of Quentin’s hands slaps backwards against the headboard and the other reaches out, frantic for any bit of Eliot he can reach, his arms, his chest, his rapidly working throat. Margo is close enough that she can see the way Eliot’s eyes close and a beatific smile comes over his face as Quentin’s body welcomes him in, as she starts to touch herself, so wet already, can see the way Quentin’s back arches off the bed and see him bite his lip and take in deep steadying breaths as he bears down on the stretch, can, as she starts to play with her clit, almost feel the way you have to will your body liquid, pliant, to make room, to let Eliot take up that space inside you, how it feels like there won’t possibly be enough and then suddenly all at once there is, as your whole body goes molten, coreless. Margo can hear her own swift breathing, spreads her legs wider, moves her hand faster on herself. 

Then Eliot stretches fully over Quentin, braces on his hands over him, moves his hips in long, rolling thrusts to wring blissed out noises from Quentin. It’s not the best view. She can’t see any dicks. Just the long line of Eliot’s back, Quentin’s hairy knee clamped to Eliot’s thigh. Quentin rubs his face against his own bent arm, overwhelmed. Eliot is dropping kisses all over Quentin’s face, his closed eyes, his nose, and then Quentin’s moans are gone as he and Eliot kiss and kiss and kiss and Eliot’s thrusts go slower, slower, until they almost stop, reduced to the little aborted thrusts you can’t help but make when that urge to _fuck _is in you, and then Eliot breaks away from Quentin’s mouth and turns his head towards Margo. His eyes are still closed. His beautiful fucking face, the elegant curve of his throat and then his eyes open and find hers and they are fucking blown-black, glossy with tears, and he smiles with delight as Margo gasps because—Eliot is _performing making love to Quentin_ for her with that old shared joy but also it isn’t a performance at all, it never has been, it is his very truest thing and he’s letting her see it, see all of him, and Margo feels a tremble set up in her thighs as Eliot shuffles back to his knees so he can really give it to Quentin, so he can get his hand around Quentin cock and make him shout, and then he says, “Baby, open your eyes, look at Margo, look at how beautiful you are,” and Quentin opens his eyes and turns his head and sees Margo coming around her own fingers as hard as she ever has in her life at the sight of him, them, and Quentin comes with a yell and a sob and Eliot says, “Margo, come _here—_” reaches towards her and though her legs are so weak they almost won’t let her she can do nothing but go, go, go to him to let him laugh his release into her smiling mouth. 


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God, sorry--last chapter count change! Got carried away on the last two conversations in this, an even number is more pleasing anyway, etc.

Margo wakes up the next morning in a tangle with Eliot and Quentin. It’s not _not_ weird, but for once they are the ones that seem totally unphased and she’s the one that feels slightly off-kilter. It’s not a _bad_ sense of unease, though: there’s no guilt or shame she has to pretend to not feel. It’s unbalanced because things are opening up before her, possibility blooming. They’ll talk about it, Margo thinks. Knows. But later. Right now she doesn’t feel inclined to marr the afterglow of fucking morning cuddling with questions. It’s enough to not have to start from the bed from the sound Alice Quinn slamming Margo’s bedroom door behind her, to not nearly get shoved out of bed by Quentin in his scramble to follow her, to be able to meet Eliot’s eyes. She lets this morning overwrite that one, and even if that’s all this is it will have been worth it. 

When they emerge from Quentin and El’s bedroom, Margo wearing one of Eliot’s shirts and not much else, her dress and bra still tossed over a chair in the living room, Penny and Julia are in the kitchen. Julia, who’s just brought her coffee cup to her lips, lowers it very slowly, eyes huge, brows high. Penny takes one look at them and says, “Again? Oh _hell_ no, I did not come back from the dead for this,” and immediately travels out of the room, which Margo feels is a frankly hypocritical and excessive reaction given his late but dramatic role in their quainter pyschosexual drama of yesteryear. 

But they play it off. Quentin is blushing furiously and a bit awkward, but far less so than Margo would have expected. Eliot makes them all breakfast, Julia included. When they’re done eating Eliot goes to take a shower and Margo decides she needs one of her own, but before Quentin can follow Eliot, Julia hauls him off for a hushed conference in a hallway. 

After, looking less debauched and approaching presentable, it’s Eliot and Julia’s turn to get dragged off, by Kady and Alice this time, apparently needing backup for some Library business. (Thank _god_ Alice wasn’t there this morning when they emerged from the bedroom, that’s just what they needed.) Margo declines, and although Quentin often helps out with various bits of hedge business, Eliot and Julia seem to draw the line at him actually entering the precinct of the Library even if there isn’t much risk involved, which Quentin seems to have no problem with.

Then Quentin has to walk the dog and he asks Margo if she wants to come with and she says yes. Quentin seems a little more awkward now that they’re alone. It’s funny how Quentin can so powerfully communicate his intense awareness of the already well-known information that you’ve fucked, just kind of by existing. Speaking of hilarious things… 

“So what did you say to Julia?” Margo says once they’ve gotten to the park and are walking along at a steady pace. Quentin still manages to nearly trip over the dog’s leash somehow. 

“Oh, um, about…” 

“Yes, Quentin. That.”

Quentin’s ears are pink. It’s not cold. “She wanted to know if we were all, um, I guess, uh, if that was a thing.” 

“If what was a thing?” Margo is having a lot of fun here.

“Us,” Quentin says. “Like—like her, and Kady and Penny.” 

Right, that whole thing. Eliot had regaled her with their whole torrid saga over tacos (she waltzes into the penthouse unexpectedly; Eliot says _what _actual_ food are you craving tonight?_) last month, that she guesses has since worked out into being a _thing_. She does some translation from Quentinish and guesses they’re all dating. She focuses on how hysterical the idea of Wicker pressing a book about ethical non-monogamy into Quentin’s mortified hands is to ignore the slight sense of unease she suddenly feels. 

“And you said...” 

“No? Not like she was thinking, anyway. That you were just, our best friend who we. Slept with.”

Well, that’s a relief. “I see. And how did the best friend you _don’t_ sleep with take that?” 

Quentin laughs a little. “I don’t think she understood it? She was just like _oh, well, that’s nice, Q,_” and Margo has been witness to enough of the phenomenon of _Q and Jules_ conversations to be able to perfectly hear the tone this was said in. 

Margo takes a deep breath. “I don’t understand either.” She thinks she’s close but—this is too important to leave there. 

Quentin looks startled, like he can’t believe just out-of-the-blue fucking her last night didn’t magically resolve everything, or that he can’t believe it didn’t resolve everything neatly for _Margo_. Which, fair enough, but there’s something in the fucking air, apparently. 

What Quentin says after an almost awkwardly long silence: “Eliot misses you.” 

Margo nearly stops dead in her tracks, but forces herself to keep walking. “I’m right here.” 

“Margo,” Quentin says, frustrated.

“Quentin,” Margo says, suddenly furious, but brought up short by how much there is she wants to say and how none of it seems right. _He misses _me_? Whose fault do you think that is? Why isn’t he the one telling me that? Fuck you! _

“We see each other all the time. I’m here now.” Margo bends down, lets the dog off the leash, grabs a ball from where she knows it’s located in Quentin’s pocket, hurls it with all her might so it goes flying into some bushes and the dog takes off after it. Because they do, right? She sees him all the time, if not as much as she’d like. Which would be every single day. She can feel Quentin’s eyes on the side of her face.

“Yeah. All the time. So you don’t miss him?” Margo whirls on Quentin, feeling true rage take over but Quentin doesn’t break his steady gaze or even flinch.

“Oh, _fuck you_, you don’t get to pull that shit, not when you—” Margo cuts herself off so abruptly she might actually bite her tongue. 

“What? Stole him from you?” Jesus, Quentin is such a drama queen. The dog runs back up to them panting harshly, having finally secured the ball through great effort and Margo picks it up but Quentin snatches it out of her hands before she can chuck it, to throw it a more considerate distance. 

Margo laughs harshly, the scorn in it unfeigned. “Please, you did not _steal_ him from me.”

“_I know_. I would never _want_ to. That’s what I’m saying.”

“Is that what you were trying to say last night by fucking me?” 

Quentin opens his mouth but no words follow, and yeah, apparently that was exactly what that was about. God, Quentin is so weird about sex. Then again, Margo had fucked them, so maybe they are all super weird about sex? Probably. 

“You didn’t seem to object,” Quentin mutters. Fucking brat. But Margo can feel her anger dissipating. It’s something to almost laugh at, to feel the sweetness of, the idea that of course in Quentin and Eliot’s new boring world of monogamy, somehow a threesome wouldn’t be an exciting way to spice up the marriage but an act of—comfort. That’s what Quentin had been trying to give them, Margo thinks. She thinks of the way she had felt, falling asleep between them last night—a sense of surety. Homecoming. 

“I just don’t understand why you haven’t dragged Eliot back to Fillory by his ear with me clinging to his ankles, I guess,” is what Quentin follows up with when Margo doesn’t say anything further.

Margo makes a small noise of frustration. “Is that what you think of me? I want—fuck, _of course_ I want Eliot in Fillory with me! But I also want him to be happy. I _need_ him to be okay, and here, with you, he’s—”

“He is. We are. Are you happy, in Fillory?”

Margo looks at him. Does he expect her to say no, that’s she’s just pining away? Because she’s the High King and she’s banging the High King and she’s genuinely doing fucking superb, thanks, and the fact that she—she does ache, for Eliot, that it doesn’t go away, is just a _total bitch_ but she guesses that’s life.

“Yes,” Margo grits out. Refusing to perform her life’s many satisfactions for him. He can believe her or not. But Quentin nods, earnestly. 

“Yeah. I know. And you still miss him. Why would it be any different for Eliot?”

Oh. Oh. 

“Fuck you, Coldwater,” Margo says, without heat this time, and Quentin laughs a little. Dares to reach out, and tangle his hands with hers.

“Margo, I just—I want _everything_, for Eliot. I want him to have everything he wants. I think he’s still—there’s some things that he has to say to you, but that’s where I’m coming from. _Everything_ includes _you_.”

Margo has to blink against the sudden burning in her eyes. God, fuck him for real. “I want that for Eliot too. I’m just not so sure _everything_ includes Fillory anymore, for him.”

Quentin sighs, like Margo is being purposefully dense. 

“Fillory is your home, so yeah, it does. And what about you?” Quentin says. “It’s not just Eliot. I want _all_ of us to get what we want.”

Margo scoffs and is reminded of Quentin’s own scorn when she suggested to him that they should try for what makes them happy. Maybe that’s part of what loving someone is, reminding them of that when they can’t believe it themselves. That’s so gross, she can’t believe she just thought that, Quentin Coldwater is _contagious_.

But Margo didn’t mean Fillory, not exactly. She meant something for which Fillory was the easiest shorthand for she could come up with on the spot. Margo bends down, puts the leash back on the dog. Resumes walking, as she thinks about what to say. When it comes, it bursts out of her.

“We talked about what he wanted out of life, back at Brakebills. I can remember what I wanted. I knew exactly. Me and Eliot were gonna graduate and we were going to move to the city and get an apartment together. We would have wowed some mentor and we would have great jobs, or maybe not, the job wasn’t the point. It would all be for funding our fabulous lifestyle and if we couldn’t swing that we’d get by on charm and magical talent. We’d blow and snort our way through our hottest and most flexible decades, and then we’d open a hotel or something upstate and then maybe we’d start dating at a very well-preserved sixty, only to without warning marry identical twin French 20 year olds we met our annual trip to Monte Carlo.”

“Um, wow, that’s...very specific.” 

“The details are irrelevant. They changed a long time ago. The point is…” 

Margo is finding it difficult to explicitly express what lies underneath these words. The point was not this specific vision of the future, which she has known wasn’t viable for a long time. Maybe she never quite believed it was true. It was merely the frothy casing on the inner wish that she and Eliot would be together always, partners, the only two worthy people in a disappointing world. Eliot was hers. He still is, but now he’s Quentin’s too.

“It’s just—Eliot is it, for me,” is what she finally comes up with. This is inadequate, and open to misinterpretation. It’s the best Margo can do. 

“Yeah,” Quentin looks at her, sweet and serious. “I get that. He’s it for me, too. I know how much he means to you. How much you mean to him. Look, Margo—I always knew dating Eliot would involve kind of dating you too.”

“I am _not_ dating you, Coldwater.” 

“I know.”

“But you’re dating me.”

“Yeah. Maybe just a little. You walked in on me in the shower yesterday morning because you couldn’t find tweezers and then you sat on the toilet and talked to me while you...did something with tweezers.”

“That shower has a curtain, I couldn’t see anything, chill out.”

Quentin gives that annoying little_ stop being so mean guys_ huff, as Margo continues: “I’m not dating you, but you’re dating me. That makes no sense.”

Quentin shrugs, smiles. “When have our lives ever made sense?” 

“Yeah, well, that’s what I’m trying to say. I was prepared for a lot of weird shit, but not Eliot remembering an entire lifetime without me where he found true joy in your rustic love shack.”

“Oh,” Quentin says.

“Yeah, _oh_,” Margo says, and walks a bit more savagely, leaving Quentin to actually work to keep up, before she deflates. “It’s just—really fucking weird for me. He told me everything and you were dead, and it was a lot to process, the fact of it, but now it’s also that he came out of getting those memories and being possessed and losing you wanting something I could never have imagined he wanted and I don’t know how to adjust.”

“You know, it’s not changed that much. We’re going to be in Fillory more and more often.”

Margo sighs. “I know, and it’s great. It’s better, really. But it’s not the same.”

“Yeah.” They fall back into a rhythm and walk on in silence for a few minutes.

“You said you didn’t know what you wanted,” Margo says, breaking the silence. “Out of life. But you do, right? The _beauty of all life_, that’s what got you the third key. That’s what Eliot said you tried to ask him for. To do that again.”

_And the beauty of all life didn’t include me. _Margo has no idea why she feels bitter about this. If she had gone back in the past in Fillory and had to spend her days attempting to solve an unsolvable puzzle while living in a shack the size of her room in the penthouse, she would probably have ended up killing Eliot or the both of them or whoever was stuck with her, and then herself. 

“I’m not keen to relive a life with no indoor plumbing,” Quentin replies, and Margo just gives him a look. “OK, yeah, I want that again. Parts of it. I want to be a dad, to have a family. But I don’t want a wife, and I’m glad to see the back of that puzzle. And Margo, it wasn’t perfect, and that was the _point_. That it was just life, and life kind of fucking sucks a lot of the time. We had huge unresolved issues we never talked about and—Jesus, there were these _holes_ at the center of our lives, and they were shaped like you and Julia. Eliot missed you every single day.”

_Good_, she thinks before she could stop herself. She would give up her eye again, if she thought it could buy Eliot a life free of pain, but she’s glad he felt that one. 

Quentin stops, reaches out for her arm. They move to the side of the path out of the way of joggers, and the dog plops down, exhausted. Quentin has got his determined little _I’ve got something to say_ look on his face. 

“You know—you remember when I almost got kicked out of Brakebills?” 

“Vaguely, yes.” 

“Well, I came back from Fogg’s office where Jane Chatwin—although like, I didn’t know it was her yet—had told me I wasn’t getting expelled after all, and I came to find Eliot because he had been really kind to me about it, and when I came around the corner of the Cottage you and he were grilling out, and you both were hungover and gorgeous and _absurd_ and you waved me over and you seemed genuinely happy to see me and I was just so grateful that I got to stay. It was like my entire life was leading to that moment, with you two waiting for me. You’ve always been a part of the moment when my life started to feel right.”

Jesus, is this the kind of shit these two are saying to each other all the time? No wonder they’re so useless. Exhausting.

“That was probably a high point, Q. I mean, it’s kind of worrying, you’d seen Dean Fogg’s eyes ripped out at that point, but it was still _meant to be,_ for you.” 

“Yeah, well.” Quentin’s looking down at his feet, and shit, she’s ruined it. She takes his hand and he looks up at her. 

“I just mean—even with everything that’s come after. Is that still how you feel?” 

“Messed up, huh?” A wry twist to his mouth. Margo just shakes her head. No, _yes_, but; the moment she got magic and the moment she met Eliot were a couple of hours apart and the very same moment and she would do everything over again for it. “If it was all leading to this, yes,” Quentin says. “Yeah, that’s how I still feel.” 

Margo’s throat hurts, as she thinks of Quentin, face bruised. Nearly killed by the Beast a week in. Thinks of Quentin, bloody, a monster’s toy. 

“Really?” Margo says, an edge of self-loathing that she doesn’t often let show creeping into her voice. “Even after I fucked off to Fillory and left you alone here with that thing?”

Quentin jerks, shocked by the way she’s suddenly opened the door wide to those months of terror. Margo is sorry to spoil his morning after in a new, inventive way, but it just bubbles out of her. 

Quentin looks like he’s at a total loss for words so she guesses she can’t blame him when he comes up with something really stupid: “I wasn’t alone. I had Julia.” 

Margo’s laugh is harsh, staccato. “Yeah, well. Look how that turned out.” 

“Margo—”

“I’m just—what I’m trying to do really fucking badly is say _sorry_. I should have said that months ago. That thing touched me _once_ and I couldn’t stand it and I ran back to Fillory as fast as I could and I left you to babysit it.” 

Quentin’s eyes are glassy, but he’s always so brave when it really matters. He doesn’t look away. “I—thank you? For the apology. But that’s—that’s not how I think of it.”

“What other way is there to think of it, Quentin? That thing tormented you and I wasn’t here.”

“So you should have hung around to let it torture you, too?”

“I shouldn’t have left you alone,” Margo whispers. 

Quentin just nods. Not arguing. “Yeah, maybe. But the way I see it is...I took care of Eliot for as long as I could, you know? I took it as far as I could. I kept his body safe. But I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. But _you did_. Right as I got too tired, there you were. With the way to get him back. I always thought of it as a team effort. You and me—we took care of him. We got him back home.”

Margo is, maybe, crying just a little bit. “Yeah, but who took care of you, Q?” 

Quentin looks away, but with one arm around her shoulders he pulls her into a hug, right there in the grass in a public park, strangers going by. Margo thinks maybe the dog has gone to sleep. She knows the answer to her question—Eliot had taken care of him and he had taken care of Eliot and Margo had failed them, over and over, she thinks, as for the first time she cries and cries for the fact that Quentin died and she wasn’t there, cries against Quentin’s shoulder, his wonderful living shoulder, which is a pretty bitch move of her, when you think about it.

“Margo,” he says softly, hand stroking clumsily at her hair. “Hey, Margo.”

“Stop it,” she says, “stop fucking comforting _me_, asshole,” she says as she wraps her arms around his middle and _squeezes_ tight and he laughs, a little thick. God, _Quentin_. She couldn’t have done what Quentin had done; she couldn’t do what he and Eliot were doing now, every day. She must have said some garbled version of this last bit because Quentin says, “Well, I couldn’t have got those axes.”

“Couldn’t have compromised the integrity of Eliot’s abdominal muscles forever because you aimed at his stomach instead of like, his shoulder, yeah.” She does feel bad about that. Just a little.

“Or gotten Fillory back from some time-traveling evil usurper. So.” 

“Q, you couldn't do that because you were _literally dead_,” she says, finally pulling back. Wiping at her face with her fingers. Quentin pats his pocket, like he’d actually have something in there to help with the tragic state of her face. Margo hauls in a shuddering breath. Nope, crying jag still not quite done. “I’m just—I am so fucking sorry.” 

That’s all she can do, she thinks, and doesn’t that fucking suck ass. There are some things you just can’t fix, not with magic and not with badass axes and not with sheer force of will. Not even being willing to sit in a quiet room and exist with whatever pain or hurt or sadness is there with you. She fucked up, and she just has to apologize, and live with it. 

And—“Never again, OK? None of us is ever fucking bitching out again, and none of us is ever fucking dying again, capice?”

“Yeah, that sounds good to me.” Then Quentin pauses, in a way that's obviously trying for significance. “We’re all better when we’re together.” 

Cheesy, but Margo guesses she has to concede the point. “Yeah, Q. We are.”

“But that’s hard. When you’re on different planets most of the time.”

Margo rolls her eyes and they start to walk back home. “Alright, I got it. You guys want to split your time between Earth and Fillory.” Then, letting all sharpness leach out of her tone: “I want that too, Q.”

“Good. Just—make sure Eliot knows that, alright?” 

“He can’t possibly not know that,” Margo says, turning in disbelief to Quentin when they’re stuck waiting at a crosswalk.

“He can be,” Quentin pauses, looking for a diplomatic phrase, “pretty thick, sometimes.”

Fair enough. She’ll work on it.

When they are waiting for the elevator in the penthouse, Margo says, “I know I’ve ruined the mood totally, here, but while it was great working this out, when I said I didn’t understand I was more referring to the…’best friend we slept with’ thing.

“Oh,” Quentin says, blinking. “Um, that’s just—I don’t know. What felt right to me, but—”

“No, it feels right to me too. I was more referring to...the tense of the verb.”

“Ah,” Quentin says. Dimpling. Blushing a little. “Uh, the tense is—present. If that’s what you want.”

God. What a nerd. “Yeah. That’s what I want,” Margo says, as the elevator doors open on the penthouse floor, and they can hear Eliot’s voice, calling their names.


	12. Chapter 12

Margo is at her desk writing the third in a long string of tedious letters when a page comes in announces that the Former High King Eliot has arrived. Margo’s heart thuds against her ribs with dread, because she hasn’t heard anything from him about a visit.

When he’s shown in he dramatically throws himself into an armchair and glares at the disapproving, retreating back of one of the younger Pickwicks and says, “They’ve forgotten this was my castle once. ‘I’ll ask the High King if she would like to see you’, I mean, _really_.”

“It’s my castle now, bitch,” she says, abandoning her work to go perch on his lap. “Be around more and I’ll work on getting you some official privileges. Where’s Q?” 

“He was helping Julia with some intercenine dragon conflict she’s mediating. He said he’d come when they wrapped things up. “

“Wow,” Margo whispers, faux-solemn. “Big day. Are you sure you’re gonna make it?”

“No, I’m really not,” Eliot sighs, with far less convincing sarcasm, “but I wanted to see you, Bambi.”

He rests his chin on the top of her head, and she kicks off her shoes to better curl up in his lap. 

“Are you done being weird now?” Eliot says. She can feel the vibrations of this through his chest, over the steady beat of his heart.

“I haven’t been weird.” Eliot makes a thoughtful noise, which is rich coming from him, but they just sit in silence for a few more minutes. Then Margo sighs, looks at the fading light falling through the high windows and says, “I really have to finish this shit, then we can do something fun.” 

She stands up and goes back to her desk. Eliot follows her and sits on the edge, shuffles through the paper carpeting her desk with an idle hand, an expression of distaste on his face.

“I don’t miss this,” he says. 

Margo pauses in the midst of her signature: she’s been experimenting, doing interesting things with the ‘M.’ Anything to relieve the tedium. “Do you miss any of it?” 

Eliot opens his mouth, obviously comes up blank, and closes it with comedic slowness. “No, not really. Not—any of this. Not the actual being-a-king parts.”

“But you miss something about it.” Margo says. She sets down her pen. 

Eliot sighs, laughs. “I miss—how it made me feel about myself. Sometimes. Like everything that had happened to me, everything I’d done, had been leading to something. I wanted it to take me out of myself, but it was the same self-absorbed bullshit, fancier packaging.” 

“Honey, that’s not true. You cared.” He had. Eliot couldn’t help caring about shit, enormously. 

“I cared about you and Quentin and everyone else not dying horribly, but sure. We can call it a noble sacrifice. I certainly did. I thought it was obviously what someone who wasn’t a narcissistic coward would do. I was already miserable and it seemed like this was going to make me more miserable, but that’s what I thought magic meant—you were miserable but at least it was for a reason.” 

Margo opens her mouth to—argue? What he’s saying isn’t untrue, but it just makes Margo heart break, for loving him. She doesn’t know how to communicate this to him; she never has. 

Eliot raises his hand. “No—this is actually isn’t self-loathing dramatics, for once. It’s just, I’ve accepted it. Fillory saved me, and I’ve repaid it by being the world’s most incompetant monarch, and I thought this would be the rest of my life once, but it’s not.” 

_It’s not,_ but Eliot is here, with her, right now. Margo will finish this and she’ll go find Fen then they’ll all drink some of the consumable booze Eliot better have brought her from Earth, and partake whatever amusement Whitespire has to offer on an average evening, which mostly consists of teaching various Pickwicks poker and taking their money. 

“The world’s most incompetent monarch was definitely a joint title,” Margo says after a moment. “And we’ve _definitely_ saved Fillory several times, not that it will ever thank us.”

“Maybe it was a joint title, but it’s not anymore. You actually care enough. To stick it out. To make something of it.” Margo could point out that he’d probably still be miserably sticking it out if he hadn’t got possessed, but he’s actually landed on the exact point without realizing it.

“I want to. I like it.” 

Eliot gives a wry laugh, self-directed. This is of course the crux of it—that Eliot had once thought that what he wanted shouldn’t matter. But he doesn’t actually try any verbal martyrdom, so, progress. 

“You actually like…” Eliot peers at the paper closest to hand, “wait, the bunnies are unionizing?”

_That_ is definitely not something Margo wants to get sidetracked into having a conversation about right now. “I like having a motherfucking castle.” 

Margo doesn’t know how to explain it, how most days are an exercise in frustration after frustration, how most of the day to day bullshit of ruling a whimsical fantasy realm was actually dull enough to bore her to tears, and she’s never been happier in her fucking life. It’d be as useless as Eliot trying to explain to her that extremely nauseating look he gets whenever he makes eye contact with a baby, lately. It’s alright; here’s Eliot looking at her with a fondness she feels like she could wrap herself in. Margo looks back at him, letting everything she feels for him flood into her eyes and they just gaze at each other, totally incomprehensible and totally known. 

But then she tries, for him. “Remember before your wedding to Fen, when I came and told you about what Fillorian marriages actually entailed? You said…” something about wanting his life to be about more than his thoughts and his feelings, Margo recalls. “I said, that you wanted something bigger. But I think maybe it was me. That wanted that.” 

This feels humiliating to admit, like the absurdity of _Margo_ of all people claiming this will get her laughed out of the room. It’s just Eliot, so of course not, but also it’s _Eliot_, whose feelings are so big that he thought maybe only a whole country could make them bearable. Margo’s feelings have never been very big: deep yes, but narrow. 

Eliot smiles at her. His eyes crinkle at the corners, the lines deeper, impressions of past grief revealed by present joy. Only a country was big enough to compete with this. “Yeah, Brakebills wasn’t a fitting stage for your talents.”

Then his face goes solemn. He clears his throat and looks away. “There are some things I do miss about Fillory, though. Weirdly.”

Margo swallows. Thinks, _you said it was your home, once_. “It’s right here.” 

When Eliot doesn’t say anything, Margo goes on, wildly, “I don’t know what you two want from me. A signed invitation? A parade?”

Eliot looks down. “I know. But I don’t want to insert myself where I’m not needed. I know things are different now. It’s you and Fen’s show.”

“Eliot, please tell me you aren’t actually this stupid.” It comes out meaner than she intended, from the way Eliot looks at her. He opens his mouth, but Margo actually isn’t finished.

“Is that what you think this is about? Just because you’re not High King anymore, that I don’t—just say the word and every Pickwick prick can go fuck themselves.” 

Eliot says, “It wasn’t actually obvious.”

Margo snorts with enough derision that she hopes it’s clear what she thinks of that. Eliot can really just be incredibly dense sometimes.

“Really, Margo? _Oh, Eliot you’re a physical and emotional wreck, you’ll be bringing this revolution down. Oh, Eliot, me and Fen have more competence in our little fingers than you did in your entire kingly body…”_

“That is _not_ fucking fair,” Margo hisses. “That isn’t fair and you know it.” 

Eliot’s jaw sets, stubborn.

Margo takes a deep breath. She’s angry, at Eliot for being _such_ a bitch sometimes, and at herself, that she could have ever said or done anything to lead Eliot to draw this laughably wrong conclusion. It was just so clear to her, that Eliot had discovered what he truly wanted and it lay with Quentin, and whatever he’d found on the key quest that had left him so destroyed in Quentin’s absence. Of course her first instinct had been to fucking beg Eliot to come back anyway, she didn’t care if the High Kings didn’t need him, Margo Hanson did, every fucking day, she _needed_ him, she didn’t care if he’s as happy as she’s ever seen him, _come back_, but she was actually trying to be a fraction less monstrously fucking self-centered, not that anyone seemed to ever recognize it in her, and anyway she—

“El,” Margo says. Voice ragged. “There is always a place for you here. If I haven’t made that clear it’s because I wanted you to have time to think about what you want and—I know what it’s like to miss you, okay?”

Margo isn’t actually thinking of the months with the Monster. She’s thinking of when she was Janet Pluchinsky. Further back than that, to Dean Fogg standing before them in Castle Blackspire, about to force them to take that mind-wipe potion and Margo had _begged_. Maybe for the one and only time in her life, she’d begged. _Please_, she’d said,_ please, take away our memories, you fucker, fine, but can you just—can you please let me and Eliot be together? Even if we aren’t ourselves?_

Eliot is looking at her strangely. “I know what it’s like to miss you too,” he says. 

Then there’s a brisk knock and Fen is poking her head around the door, “Margo, are you coming to dinner or having it in your rooms tonight? Oh, hi Eliot, what a nice surprise!” 

“We’re coming, Fen,” and Fen nods and closes the door behind her. Margo looks at her desk, and sighs. It’ll be a late night. “C’mon, El. Let’s go eat.”

Eliot nods at her, smiles. Both of them willing to let it go for now. “Okay. But I wanted to ask you—tomorrow, if you aren’t too busy, there’s something I want to show you. Away from the castle. Call it a day trip.” 

Margo wonders what he’s planning. She _is_ probably too busy but, well—a day trip with Eliot sounds like heaven. “Yeah, I think I can swing that.” 

Of course, early the next morning after an hour of tramping through some Fillorian woods, it’s less heavenly. Still more fun than it should have any right to be, just because she’s with Eliot. 

When they finally break through to a clearing, Margo knows instantly where they are. She’d started to suspect a while back.

It’s been taken over by weeds, worming their way up through the square in the middle. There are dull, broken bits of once brightly colored tile, dotting the thick summer grass. A small hut of rotting wood, roof beams fallen completely in. 

“It was really _that_ small?” is the first thing that comes out of her mouth. 

“It was bigger on the inside,” Eliot says. There’s a pause, and yeah, no, just because she’s pretty sure they’re both are thinking of that one time they fucked as the next episode autoplayed and the tunes of the Doctor Who theme song rang out does not mean she’s going there. 

“Jesus, Eliot.” She looks over at him. Looking wistful, but not overcome. He looks back at her, gives a small smile.

“Me and Quentin came one day, when we were here for the coronation,” he explains. 

“That must have been—a lot.”

“Yeah. It was. It was good, though. I think we needed to do it.” 

Margo is still taken with the size of that fucking shack, which even if was once bigger on the inside, is still in the middle of the goddamn woods. “So you lived in that hovel and worked on that puzzle. Every day. For decades.”

“You’ve got the gist.” 

Margo’s chest aches. “And Quentin got married, and had a child, and then you raised that child, together, in your shack in the woods.”

Eliot looks away from her. “Yeah.”

Margo’s breath shudders out of her. “And you were happy,” she says, very small. “That made you happy.”

Eliot looks back at her, eyes shining. “It did.”

“I’m glad, baby,” Margo says. “It’s just a lot for me too, you know? I know adulthood entails seeing people who once did lines of coke off your tits posting pictures of their babies on Facebook but I don’t know if I could ever prepare for it being _you_.”

Eliot looks out at the trees. “Yeah. So I understand this might freak you out, sorry—what I brought you here to tell you is that that life, at the mosaic? It made me realize that something like it was what I had wanted all along. I just always kind of thought it would involve you.”

Margo’s heart is doing something complicated. “If you ever imagined me having Coldwater’s baby, I’m going to have to cut _his_ dick off.”

Eliot rolls his eyes, but then shoots her a look of genuine horror. Yeah, yeah, Quentin’s dick is his reason for living, but calm down. “Jesus. _No_. I mean, I was full of shit. I wanted Quentin to myself, and I know the aggressive domesticity isn’t for you, but I just—missed you. A lot. Like, an indescribable amount. I think what I wanted was—exactly this. What I have now.” 

“What do you have now, El?”

He’s quiet for a long moment. “A family. I mean, that’s what we had, that’s what I got through being too much of a cowardly asshole to accept what Quentin wanted to give me. But you—you were the first real family I ever had. I don’t even know how to think of it, without you. Somehow, for some reason, I get to have that again. Quentin, forever. Fen, _you—_and now Julia, and maybe even the rest of our merry gang—you’re all my family.”

It doesn’t make Margo uncomfortable, when Eliot says it. She knows exactly what he means by it, what claim he’s making on her. 

“Way too many people in that list have fucked for it to be a family, Eliot. Also no more than three people in it can stand to be in the same room for an extended length of time.” 

“I think it’s up to like, four now, be fair,” Eliot says with a laugh, before looking serious again. “Anyway, I know it’s not our hedonistic glory days or leading armies on an alien planet of pure magic—” 

“El,” Margo says. Urgent. “I could never have done what you did here. I mean, I would have blown this place up within a week,”—at this, Eliot laughs so loud she almost stops—"so there goes all of magic, you know? But not just that. I couldn’t do what you and Quentin have been doing.” 

A lifetime of dedication, to something that will never be solved or fixed or avoided. It might progress, but you won’t be able to see, or tell. The progress is just waking up to do it all over again. Here, at the mosaic. There, in the penthouse. 

“It’s been our Cottage summer,” Eliot says. “Me and Quentin’s.”

Eliot smiles, at Margo’s visible surprise. “Remember?” he prompts.

Their Cottage summer: break after their first year. Technically all students were required to leave campus, but Eliot and Margo had tampered with the wards and used the Cottage as their crash pad. They’d built the portal to London in Margo’s closet. They’d brought boys and girls back through it to fuck. They’d drank like fish and danced in the living room and watched home video of Eliot’s high school theater productions and Eliot had let Margo laugh at him until she literally cried and he’d laughed with her. 

They would have never have gotten caught if Fogg’s booze hadn’t run out and he hadn’t decided to raid the Cottage’s infamously well-stocked stash—considerably less well-stocked a month in Margo and Eliot sojourn, but there was enough that Fogg just sighed wearily when he saw them and got three glasses and that’s the story of the time they got drunk with the Dean, who should absolutely not have a job, whatever, and that’s why Eliot insisted on calling him Henry. (At one point late that evening, Eliot had looked over Fogg’s head at Margo, raised his eyebrows and jerked his chin in Fogg’s direction in their clear_ you down? _signal and what, no, Eliot, absolutely not, you _freak_.)

“_Obviously_. I just—I don’t see the similarity, here, between that and you and Q _going to therapy_ a bunch.” 

“Well. Granted. There are some key differences. But it was—a foundation. It was me learning how to fucking love someone. How to be happy, and not run from it. I learned it all, for the first time, that summer with you.”

Margo really wishes they’d stop making her cry. “I don’t think it stuck,” she whispers. Thinking of everything that came after, between then and this moment now. Shamed, and sorry. 

Eliot reaches out, touches her face. The ends of her hair. “I’m a slow learner,” he says self-deprecatingly. 

Margo takes his hand and presses a kiss to the middle of his palm and says, “I don’t think that’s it. I think, Eliot, I—”

“Margo.” Eliot cups her face in his palms. “This? Here? Me being a _decent partner_ and a _good father_, against all possible fucking odds, I could have never done it, if I hadn’t learned what having a home meant, from you. That’s why I brought you here, what I need you to see. _I know what it is to miss you, too_. I had a whole fucking lifetime of missing you. I don’t want another.”

Margo doesn’t deserve this. She never has. But she has it anyway. She’s not like Eliot. She’s always been selfish enough to accept that. 

Margo thinks about what Quentin had said. _Right as I got too tired, there you were. Well, I couldn’t have gotten those axes. Or gotten Fillory back from some time-traveling evil usurper._

“You don’t—Eliot, you _don’t have to_. I’m right here. I can’t do what you and Quentin do but I—I did this. I made Fillory safe, and at peace, and partly it was for you. Because it was your home once, and it saved us, and it’s here for you if you want it. Fuck, El, I_ miss you too_. I didn’t want to ask because I didn’t think I could bear it, if I didn’t have at least the possibility of you coming back someday. If I got a confirmation that it was just—you and Quentin and arguing about what preschool to send your disgustingly photogenic progeny to, forever. But OK. I’ll ask,” she says as Eliot starts to smile, and she can feel the responding grin on her own face, helpless as always in the face of him. “This is me, asking. _Come home_. This is still a home for you if you want it to be. I don’t care if you don’t want to be a king. You’re _mine_. Come back.” 

Eliot kisses her. “OK,” he says as he slots her right where she belongs, under his chin, against his heart. “OK.”

They sway there for a moment, and Eliot whispers, “This is me saying yes, just for the record,” and Margo isn’t crying. Her laugh comes out a little strained, though.

As they’re walking back to Whitespire, hand in hand, Eliot sighs and says, “I know you’re probably tired of hearing Quentin and I’s existential woes, but—I don’t know what I _am_ here, anymore. If I get official privileges, do they come with official duties?”

“No, I think I’ve got enough of a handle on the council to get them to sign off on two retired Kings of Fillory being drains on the public purse.”

A little laugh, but Eliot looks dissatisfied. “I don’t want to be High King again—but I don’t want to be useless. Neither does Quentin.”

“You aren’t _useless_,” Margo responds automatically. “But if you want work, there’s plenty. I can also play career counselor for two retired Kings of Fillory. What do you _want_ to do?” 

Eliot looks at her like she’s speaking the foreign language Fillory weirdly does not possess. Margo sighs. “Josh is Master of Ceremonies, and he’s doing great, but honestly he does a lot of other shit and he’s spread pretty thin. And he lacks a certain flair. Help him out. Or redesign those hideous guard uniforms. I’ll give you some cash and you and Quentin can go wine tasting and build up Whitespire’s wine cellar. Whatever you want.”

“‘Fillorian party planner, Royal couturier and sommelier’ has a certain ring to it. If hard to fit on a business card.”

If she has to spell it out one last time, she can. “Eliot, just because you aren’t High King anymore and don’t want to be, just because me and Fen have shit handled, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for you and Quentin. And if you assholes still need the signed invitation or parade, I can fucking do that. Hell, throw in a skywriter. Alright?”

Eliot says, “I did need to hear that again, actually.”

“Yeah, because you’re an idiot.”

“The skywriter is unnecessary, though. Not to mention tacky.” 

Then they’re laughing, everything easing again between them. “We’ll figure it out,” Margo says, and Eliot squeezes her hand, tight, as they come over the last hill to see Whitespire laid out before them in the bright afternoon sun.

**Author's Note:**

> I am on tumblr [here](https://honeybabydichotomy.tumblr.com/).


End file.
